Announcing updated practical guidance for Audio Conferencing and Phone System in Teams

[Bob Wille]

We’re excited to announce that we’ve updated our practical guidance for Cloud Voice in Microsoft Teams. This includes Audio Conferencing and Phone System with Calling Plans in Teams.

With this release we’re extending our guidance to complete the end-to-end customer lifecycle across the Envision, Onboard, and Drive Value phases from the familiar FastTrack customer journey framework.

Updated structure 

In addition to expanding our practical guidance across the Envision, Onboard, and Drive Value phases, we reorganized it to make it easier to follow and apply. Under Cloud Voice > Deployment guidance you’ll now see our practical guidance arranged into these sections:

• Define my success
• Make my service decisions
• Evaluate my environment
• Plan my service management
• Plan my users experience
• Document my success plan
• Prepare my service
• Prepare my users
• Deploy my service
• Operate my service
• Enhance my service

Here's what you'll find in this updated guidance: we cover topics such as how to set up your project team for success, who needs to be on the team, what are your key success metrics, and what is your deployment velocity, as well as providing guidance on the key decisions you need to make when you decide how you want to set up your service.

We hope this introduction grabs your interest! Please access the guidance to find out about these topics and many more covering your successful deployment and ongoing usage.

We’ll continue to develop and expand our guidance over time, and update you regularly via this blog series.

Emphasizing deployment and operations 

While we continue to enhance our guidance across the Envision phase, much of what we focused on in this release was helping our customers and partners properly deploy and operate mission-critical cloud voice workloads. We want to make sure you take action not only to deploy a healthy service, but to keep it that way.

Call to action

Get started using the practical guidance for cloud voice in Teams! If you have questions or feedback please let us know in the comments section.

[srinivasan Kilambi]

On this specific line  for communication credit "Dialing out from an Audio Conference meeting to add someone else from anywhere in the world.". Does this mean if I have a US customer who wants to do dial out to his local cell number or home number or work, with just dial in conferencing he won't be able to correct? He would need communication credits? The confusion is because on one hand this line reads as if this is only needed (among other items) for dial out to international numbers but I assume it also applies to local numbers correct

[Lon Orenstein]

Thanks Bob!

As a Partner, I'm already using (and paying for) Skype for Business Calling Plan and Phone System.  I setup Teams and have made an outbound call from there but when an incoming call comes in it isn't possible to answer in Teams.  From what I can find in all these blogs and announcements, this will be possible by the end of Q2.  Is that correct?  Is there a faster way to accomplish this and use Teams instead of Skype for Business as our phone system?  We've got an auto attendant and conferencing working but I want to immerse myself in Teams.  Any guidance?

Thanks,

Lon

[Bob Wille]

@Srinivasan I believe you are referencing the second bullet in this article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/skypeforbusiness/skype-for-business-and-microsoft-teams-add-on-lice... If so, as the first 'Note' in that article mentions, "Outbound calls to some destinations may be included in your Audio Conferencing subscription. Please check your subscription information for details." To determine which destinations are included, I recommend you review the following article https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/skypeforbusiness/accessibility-and-regulatory/complimentary-dial-ou... and also the PSTN terms of service http://www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/DocumentSearch.aspx?Mode=2&Keyword=PSTN.

[Bob Wille]

@Lon You can read up about forcing calls to Teams clients in the following article. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/teams-and-skypeforbusiness-interoperability Specifically, look in the 'Calling default client' section. That being said, make sure you review the article in full and are aware and comfortable with the caveats and potential changes as this is still a developing area. Make sure to watch the public roadmap for features that are not currently available. For example, you mentioned auto attendants which are not available with Teams today.

[Lon Orenstein]

Thanks for the reply, Bob!

So, it looks like I could let the auto attendant transfer calls to me and as an INDIVIDUAL user I could use Teams instead of Skype for Business.  Correct?

However, it also looks like I could NOT share my screen or a client's screen if I'm using the Teams client and they're using the Skype for Business client.  Correct?

As a workaround, I could fire up Skype for Business client when I needed to do sharing but use Teams the rest of the time.  I'm just trying to use Teams so I can tell clients why they should and teach them best practices.  Any other advice?

Take care, 

Lon