Forum Discussion
Teams Phone at Work and Home
We have a situation where several employees work from the office and from home. What is the best way to handle their Teams phones since they all want a physical phone in both locations? I do not see any way to assign a location to a device, which impacts e911 setup. Dynamic location lookup also doesn't seem to be an option since each of the home networks is not controlled by the company.
I know setting up duplicate users, whereby I can assign a number and phone to each user, then setup a resource group per user such that both phones ring, etc., but what are the pitfalls of this approach besides having to pay for another license? Is there a way to do it with a single user ID?
Since the community has not yet responded to your post, you might want to seek assistance with other resources that are focused on tech support:
- Ask your IT manager to open a support case or call Microsoft using the support line you were given. Other options for business subscription admins are listed here:
https://support.serviceshub.microsoft.com/supportforbusiness/create
- Additional tech support is available at support.microsoft.com or Answers.microsoft.com, where authorized Microsoft agents are available to trouble an issue until it’s resolved.
- After going through numerous iterations with MS Tech Support, the short answer is, there is not a good solution to this problem for work-from-home users. Dynamic location assignment works, BUT you must setup Trusted IP addresses as the first step (all other settings for WAP, subnet, etc. do not work until Trusted IP is setup). The problem for work-at-home users is very few are going to have a static IP assignment from their ISP, so your Trusted IP is only as good as the length of time that user is assigned that IP. True, most ISPs will let home users purchase a static IP block, but what a totally unnecessary hassle if MS had just put a little more thought into this and a bit of simple development. The solution only involved the ability to assign a Location to a device, how hard is that? Seems like it would be a defect option for devices that are generally not mobile, like desk phones, conference room panels, etc., which all also have a unique MAC ID.
Net-net, this is very disappointing, especially when so many have transitioned to either full-time part-time work from home employees. We are just going to setup the home devices as CAPs and then try to handle the call routing with Call Queues for each user containing both their office number and work-from-home CAP number. Of course, that eliminates the whole power of Teams devices by being unable to tap into the user account signed into the phone.
