Forum Discussion
Cloud PBX with AA. What are the required add-ins?
Hi Bob,
This is my understanding, but sure someone will be along soon to correct me if I'm wrong.
Your users will require 2 licences,
1) Cloud PBX licence, which essentially gives S4B the ability to have voicemail and receive calls.
2) a PSTN Calling plan licence, which will allow you to assign the user a particular PSTN number.
Currently, O365 doesn't offer cloud-based hunt groups, although it's something which is currently in preview.
For your situation, the only thing I can think to recommend would be to give your users the required licences so they have a PSTN number and voicemail, then port your main service number into a third party cloud service, then setup the group to direct the calls to the users PSTN. I'm pretty sure RingCentral offer something like this.
On a side note though, be careful your users won't exceed the allocated PSTN minutes, otherwise you'll need to setup PSTN consumption also.
Hope this helps
Thanks for the reply, Steve.
So are you saying that *each* user will require both a Cloud PBX license *and* a PSTN license? The latter requirement is what I don't understand - I guess in the old-school world of on-prem PBX's we'd have, for the sake of argument:
1) A single (or more) "outside" lines from the phone co (only as many needed to support the # of expected simultaneous calls with the outside).
2) An auto-attendant, and bunch of extensions inside, as implemented by the PBX
I guess I don't understand why each and every user must have a PSTN license, and in particular if we want dedicated Skype accounts that are really just there to receive voicemail only, but never place PSTN calls. From my limited playing around with a test tenant, it also seems that I cannot enable voicemail for a Skype user unless it has both Cloud PBX *and* PSTN - just Cloud PBX for a Skype user doesn't seem to give that user voicemail.
Bob
- Hi Bob,
Thats correct, each user will need a Cloud PBX and a PSTN Calling licence.
The PBX licence does light up the voicemail feature in Skype for Business, but without a PSTN number assigned, they would only be able to receive calls and take voicemails from other Skype users as a Skype > Skype call.
The PSTN licence is what gives you the ability to add a PSTN number (inbound and outbound) to the user, which would then roll to voicemail is unanswered.- Thank you Steve, however, this is part of my confusion. For those users who've been assigned PBX licenses (without PSTN calling), they do not seem to have any voicemail capability whatsoever. There are no settings that light up, and Skype to Skype calls to these users never go to any voicemail.
I don't belive you get voicemail until they have been assigned a phone number (And you need the PSTN addon for that)
Something to note for your scenario is that extensions are not supported currently so everyone will have a full 10 digit number (I am not sure you could block someone from direct dialing them if that was something you wanted to do).
Also AutoAttendent is currently in Preview and is extremley basic at the moment.
Richard
