Intelligent Communications takes the next step with calling in Teams
Published Dec 12 2017 11:25 AM 87.9K Views
Microsoft

In September, we introduced a new vision for intelligent communications including plans to evolve Microsoft Teams into the primary client for calling and meetings in Office 365. As part of this, we are bringing comprehensive calling and meetings capabilities into Microsoft Teams, along with data and insights from the Microsoft Graph, and a strong roadmap of innovation to empower teams to achieve more.

  Easily view your calling historyEasily view your calling historyToday we are releasing new calling capabilities in Teams, providing full featured dialing capabilities, complete with call history, hold/resume, speed dial, transfer, forwarding, caller ID masking, extension dialing, multi-call handling, simultaneous ringing, voicemail, and text telephone (TTY) support. You can expect this to roll out over the next few hours and should come soon to your tenant.


To add calling in Teams for your users, the first thing you need is Phone System (formerly Cloud PBX), which is included with Office 365 E5 and available as an add-on to other Office 365 plans. From there, you can subscribe to a Calling Plan (formerly known as PSTN Calling) for any number of users in your organization.


Together, a Calling Plan and Phone System in Office 365 create a phone system for your organization, giving each user a primary phone number and letting them make and receive phone calls to and from outside of your organization. This solution also allows your organization to shift away from expensive telephony hardware and simplifying by centralizing the management of your phone system.


With the addition of calling, Teams is an even more robust hub for teamwork -- the single place for your content, contacts and communications including chat, meetings and calling in a modern, collaboration experience.


Getting started with calling in Teams
To get started with calling in Teams, please review our quick start guide. You can learn more about geographic availability of Calling Plans here.  We also invite you to join us live December 18, at 9 AM PDT on Teams On Air to hear guest Marc Pottier, Principal Program Manager discuss and demo calling plans in Microsoft Teams in more detail.

 

70 Comments

@Aaron Buckley Integration with 3rd Party PBX's is not presently on the roadmap.  I am not sure this is something that will be added in my opinion.  Perhaps an MS PG person can comment.  What I can say is that at Ignite the notion of "Bring your own SIP trunk" will be introduced which would require an SBC on prem that would connect to an existing or new SIP Trunk.  This would allow you to leverage existing PSTN connections under contract for example. 

 

Speculative Statement - I don't see why that SBC couldn't connect to an existing PBX and leverage it for a PSTN connection and quite possibly the ability to dial internal users on another phone system and vice versa.  Disclaimer - Again, I don't know if this will be a reality nor if it will work the way you expect it to depending on how you define interoperability.  This is pure speculation on what might be possible. 

 

I would ask what are the driving reasons behind wanting to integrate and what you think that might look like from and end user perspective?

Copper Contributor

@Dino Caputo Thanks for the response!

 

I think I would have been surprised if Microsoft did have this on their roadmap. My scenario is pretty speculative and early on: My company has Office 365 E3. We are looking at a new phone system, and are pursuing a unified communications strategy. Microsoft's Phone System (either as an E3 add-on, or upgrading to an E5 plan) is one of several options that we are going to be looking at in 2018, along with a solution from Cisco.

 

In terms of a workplace chat/unified communications platform, we like what we're seeing from Teams so far. It's much better for our needs than Cisco Spark. We are concerned that if we prefer Teams, we can ONLY get Microsoft Phone System and have our unified communications goal solved for. This may be cost prohibitive if the cost of an E3 add-on or E5 licenses is non-negotiable and Cisco/another vendor offers my leadership a better deal on a phone system.

 

Ideally, I would be able to inform my leadership that Teams will be inter-operable with a range of phone system vendors in the future, but I understand there may be reasons for that not happening or not being announced!

Copper Contributor

We are a small business on O365 with 2 POTS lines over FiOS. Our O365 service is through GoDaddy. Is the licensing package I will need available through GD? And how do I migrate my phone service from my FiOS provider?

@Nicholas Plant @Ian Moran   Actually in my testing the behaviour is identical to that of a Skype for Business client on a locked workstation.  You do get a notification in terms of the audio the client makes on the inbound call.  In SfB I can answer the call with my certified headset using the call answer button.  However, in Teams you hear the inbound call but my headset doesn't answer the call.  I suspect its because my device is not yet certified for teams.  Other devices may answer the call.  More testing is required but I suspect this will improve over time.  As far as the locked screen and seeing whom is calling I am not sure this will improve as its a security issue.  I certainly wouldn't want screen pops showing who is calling or the PC unlocking on a call. 

@JD Klein I think you will need to check with GD if they can deliver you the "Phone System" License and the "Calling Plan" (domestic or international) license.

 

If you have access on the Office365 portal you can start your own porting by a wizard (US only) or Microsoft can do this for you by a Service Request.

Iron Contributor

@Dino Caputo I agree that an inbound call certainly should not automatically unlock the computer. As for a popup indicating who is calling - I think that should be configurable . Of course nobody should be forced to put the details on the lock screen but it would be nice to have the option and I am quite surprised that with Teams being a brand new application that there is NO information that one can put on the lock screen - not even the fact of team or chat activity never mind more detailed info.  I know that distinctive ring is on the roadmap but that could mean a number of different things. If one could get a different ring depending upon the origin of the call (work group; PSTN direct; Call queue X etc) then that would be one way of providing at least some information as to the origin of the call.

@Nicholas Plant Yes perhaps it can be made configurable similar to how you can expose your calendar data on the lock screen.  A 'workaround' might be that your use the Teams Mobile client and you would see the call information there.  Its a good discussion though and I'm sure this feedback will help shape the product. 

Iron Contributor

@Kevin McCarthy - in addition to what @Agus Rachman said about the command being wrong in the quick start guide, you also need to first connect to Skype Online before running the command: New-CsTeamsInteropPolicy -Identity tag:CustomPolicy -AllowEndUserClientOverride:$True -CallingDefaultClient:Default -ChatDefaultClient:Default

 

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn362795%28v=ocs.15%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

Iron Contributor

It is unfortunate that the Teams IOS app can't make or receive calls yet.  Don't see that specifically spelled out on the roadmap...

@ damon Betlow  Actually I see Calling in the Teams Preview client today so I would expect it soon for GA

 

Iron Contributor

@Krishnan Raghupathi I had a first test drive with the calling features. It looks very nice.

But I do have some specific questions around calling contacts

 

1. Do you have any plans around adding more attributes to the contact card? I see at the moment you only have the full name, company, title & phone field in a contact card. 
2. I noticed when you search on a value from a company field it doesn't return any results. Which field are used when searching for contacts?
3. I add a contact with a phone number. When that person from the contact card calls should it recognize the caller id from the contact and use the full name on the toast of the incoming call?
4. Like you stated, the teams client also uses outlook contacts. That is a nice feature. But I don't see them appear real time in the a-z list in the desktop teams client when adding new contacts in outlook. In the web version I do see them directly appear in the a-z list. How does the desktop teams client retrieve the outlook contacts and with which frequency?

 

 

Microsoft

Don't forget to join us live today during Teams On Air where we discuss the latest features and roadmap for Intelligent Communications in Office 365. You will also get the chance to participate in our live Q&A where your questions will be answered by experts from Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business. It is happening today Monday, December 18 @ 9am PST! Watch at aka.ms/TeamsOnAir.   

@Deleted -- thanks for trying out our features, that's great to hear. Here are some of the answers to your questions:

 

1. Over time we do plan to add more fields for contacts, including the ability to support multiple phone numbers and integrating with some existing fields from Outlook as well. We'd welcome feedback on particular fields that are very widely used in your company.
2. Currently you can filter a contact based on a name or number and we plan to extend this capability over job titles as well very shortly.
3. Over the next calendar year, we do plan to add the capability to look up your contacts as well for incoming phone calls.
4. The update is not real-time, currently both the desktop client and the web based app maintain an up to date of contacts from Outlook that's updated every 1 hour - this is to make sure the performance of the desktop is unaffected by constantly polling Exchange for a copy of contacts. However, if you were to return to the A-Z list of contacts after a while or restart the app, you should find the updated contact. We'll continue to improve this over time as well.

Iron Contributor

@Krishnan Raghupathi thanks for all your answers!


Fields like department or support for multiple phone numbers would be great on the contact card. And filtering or searching on department or company would also be very useful when searching for a contact.

Copper Contributor

Contacts functionality should match Office 365 Outlook functionality. If I have to have contacts stored in YET another place I'm going to lose patience. Microsoft, you have to consolidate the various platforms, not fragment them. I expect my phone system to use the contacts I've already entered. I'm not about to enter them all again to have them exist in two places. This is a failed initiative if your design is not to have the new Teams client's calling functionality not 100% (ONE HUNDRED PERCENT) match the existing SfB functionality.

Microsoft

@Gulab Prasad the ability to dial in new numbers to an ongoing call is on our roadmap and should be available later in 2018

Deleted
Not applicable

Perhaps I'm late to the party.  It seems New-CsTeamsInteropPolicy is not a command included in the most recent version of Skype for Business Remote Powershell.  If I'm missing something, please someone let me know which module I should have but don't.  

 

Anyway, it seems that the "custom policy" that the quick start guide wants us to make seems to already be present in the most current build as Tag:AllowOverrideCallingDefaultChatTeams.  That information may need to be updated.  

 

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Microsoft

Hi Everyone, I just wanted to point to some new guidance available for upgrading Skype for Business to Teams. It is available here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/migration-interop-guidance-for-teams-with-skype

 

Really great discussion in this blog post!

Copper Contributor

Not sure if it's relevant to this post but in order for us to resolve S4B & Teams call feature issues for our clients, we worked extensively with MS for over a year to build a MS-certified Connector and Calling Plan that addresses issues and missing legacy PBX features that businesses still need and MS does not see the need to develop. Legacy features such as analog, faxing, ACD Agent log-in/out, true enterprise extension dialing, external paging, etc. are still being used by many businesses.  We are developers and don't sell MS products and in order to observe non-solicitation rules, I can provide info regarding this Connector to community users who specifically ask me for it.

 

I also have a question and would like to know what challenges (if any) have anyone faced when attempting to utilize MS Teams as a full-functioning legacy PBX phone system or UCaaS replacement?  Why aren't more companies using MS Teams as a phone system since it is free and included in the E5/M5 license pack?  The alternative Cap-Ex cost of a premises-based IP phone system is at least $300-$500/user (100 user company: $30k-$50K just for the phone system alone) plus Telco lines and phone service costs.  With Teams Calling, if you have E5, phone system is included and you just need a MS or 3rd party calling plan for $10-$24/user.  Why isn't this being adopted more?

Copper Contributor

Not sure if it's relevant to this post but in order for us to resolve S4B & Teams call feature issues for our clients, we worked extensively with MS for over a year to build a MS-certified Connector that addresses issues and missing legacy PBX features that businesses still need and MS does not see the need to develop. Legacy features such as analog, faxing, ACD Agent log-in/out, true enterprise extension dialing, external paging, etc. are still being used by many businesses.  We are developers and don't sell MS products and in order to observe non-solicitation rules, I can provide info regarding this Connector to community users who specifically ask me for it.

 

I also have a question and would like to know what challenges (if any) have anyone faced when attempting to utilize MS Teams as a full-functioning legacy PBX phone system or UCaaS replacement?  Why aren't more companies using MS Teams as a phone system since it is free and included in the E5/M5 license pack?  The alternative Cap-Ex cost of a premises-based IP phone system is at least $300-$500/user (100 user company: $30k-$50K just for the phone system alone) plus Telco lines and phone service costs.  With Teams Calling, if you have E5, phone system is included and you just need a MS or 3rd party calling plan for $10-$24/user.  Why isn't this being adopted more?

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