Teams Rooms Limitations
I set up 2 Teams Rooms for one of my clients and in learning how to set up and use a Teams Room and train the client, there seems to be a LOT left to be desired with Teams Room, especially for the price of the Teams Room Pro license! The Teams Room includes an Audio Conference license, but if you want to use it you have to send the invite AS the room. So users needing this would need to be a delegated admin of the room resource. And who wants to send out an invite from "Main Conference Room on behalf of Jane" to their customers? This means each user needs their own Audio Conference license* to send out their own invites and then add the Teams room. What is the point of the room having an audio conference license? If you add a Teams Room to your invite, the attendees are shown the location of the meeting as that conference room, the only clue it is an online/teams meeting is the Teams info in the invite's message body. Then when the attendee gets an Outlook reminder for the meeting it actually shows the location as the conference room NOT a Teams meeting. No minutes are included so you can't actually use the Teams Room as a conference phone unless you add minutes. I would think for the cost of Teams Room Pro it would include a Teams Phone with Calling Plan license. So if you just want to have a conference call you have to setup a whole Teams meeting and then just use the audio portion. This has been a very difficult journey. Explaining all of this to my client after convincing them to spend a good amount of money on a Teams Room setup (equipment cost, to be fair, is not a Microsoft problem) and then continually telling them the limitations and how they need to spend more money for additional licenses to get the features they want is not a good solution. For those looking to sell a Teams Room, do the research first and be warned it is NOT a cheap or easy solution! *Thankfully the Audio Conference license is now free, that's a big thank you out to Microsoft for that!
Team Audio Conferencing Toll free billing by cost center
Hello everyone, I have looked online quite extensively for anything to answer my question, or find someone else who found themselves in my position, and what they did. I have a customer who has fully adopted Teams. They use Call in Audio conferencing numbers for their Teams meetings regularly. They want to change these Audio conferencing numbers to a toll free number or numbers. So I could simply add a toll-free conference bridge number, no problem. The problem is this organization is big, and they want to bill the Toll free minutes to different cost centers. So all of the minutes HR uses, go against HR's budget, same for Finance, operations,. etc etc. More challenging, some people may initiate Teams meetings and there for incur cost for different cost centers depending on the meeting. How are other organizations tracking, and allocating Teams Audio conferencing costs? As far as I can tell all we get is one big CSV with all billable calls, and very little detail to properly classify the call, and beyond that, it should not be up to some individual to review every single call per month, ask the person who initiated the meeting which coster center is fell under, and bill it out accordingly to different departments, that's insanely inefficient. One thought I had was use 1 toll free number per cost center, and then just sort the CSV by confeence number, and boom you have your data, but there is no way for the Meeting Initiator to choose which Audio Conference number appears by default on their meeting invite, and that wont stop someone from simply clicking on the list of available numbers and choosing one designated to a different cost center to access the meeting, which would completely eliminate any data integrity. I cant be the only person in this boat, can anyone point me in the right direction?