BToE actually works with Teams, but for how long?

An update after living with Teams for the last several months: the story with Teams and 3PIP phones (e.g. Polycom VVX) sucks, with or without BToe.

BToe sort of works in Teams as long as the Skype client is still installed on the machine - you can use the Polycom phone as an audio device for Teams. By sort of I mean that it works about 85% the time, but the Polycom gets confused because the call rings on the Polycom as a call on that device, but also gets a second copy of the call via BToe (or at least that's what I believe is happening). This was a significant enough problem that we opted to uninstall BToe when we upgraded to Teams.

Since upgrading, we have had a number of issues with Teams and Polycom coexistence. The biggest ones relate to speed dial keys and call forwarding.

- If you migrate a user from Skype to Teams and that user has delegates enabled, these settings aren't cleared in Skype - they are just sort of "not active" when the Skype client isn't running on the PC. That doesn't help the Polycom though - it still signs in as a Skype device, and in at least some ways, that delegate relationship is still visible in the Polycom world, but often broken. Even if you recreate the settings in the Teams client, that doesn't clear out or replace the Skype delegate settings.  It seems the only way to fix this is to move the user temporarily back to Islands mode, have them delete the delegation relationship in Skype and then move them back to Teams Only mode.

- Most of our users like to have Skype presence/speed dial buttons on their Polycom screens. These are based on the Favorites grouping of the Skype client.  Once again, this functionality is not replaced by the Teams client - after migrating, it is still the Skype favorites list that controls the Polycom. You can turn Line Key Customization on on the Polycom and manually rebuild the list, but if you're also using any Polycom speed dials (non-Skype speed dials), these don't appear when LKC is on.  Once again, the only way to update the Polycom speed dials is to move the user back to Islands mode, fix up the list, and then migrate back to Teams.

One other issue we've discovered - if we migrate the Delegatee - the person who is the delegate of other users to Teams, the Polycom phone gets the delegated calls, but they no longer see the referring information. In our case, we have a front desk that monitors calls for a half dozen people, and they have no idea who the call is coming in for. The solution to this was migrating this particular user back to Skype mode.

We investigated putting in Polycom Teams phones, but apparently the state of the software is pretty poor as it relates to receptionist-style workflows and line appearances - MS' fault, not Polycoms, as MS writes the Teams client software and Polycom is just a black box. We have been told "Just put a PC up there with the Teams client", but in our case, this person has many other duties than just covering the phone, and a second PC signed in as the general front desk user would not be used enough to be practical.

MS - we're pretty tired of all of the sunshine saying that Teams is at feature parity with Skype when it clearly isn't. It would sure be great if you actually built features your users want. The top 5 feature requests in UserVoice are more than 3 years old.