Calling Common Area Phones

[Mariam Penman]

good morning!

** Update **

i found that I can search for a CAP and call it, but I can't add it to my contacts or speed dials.

this will be very frustrating for staff calling labs and other common areas. any suggested workarounds.

i know the calls appear in my history, but that's not the best solution

____

we're moving our phone system to Teams and have setup Common Area Phones for our Lab area. these phones need to make calls and receive calls.

how can we call within Teams without using the full phone number, is it possible?

as an aside and perhaps as an example, when I'm in my teams app, in the calls section, I  "add speed dial", search for a common area phone, it finds it, but i can't add it to my speed dial.

is there any way to call the CAP, other than using the PSTN number?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@Mariam Penman 

This is the expected behavior as it appears that any user accounts with a "Common Area Phone" license applied to them cannot be added to any contact groups in the Teams client.

As you've discovered you can search for them:

But attempts to add them to a contacts list will produce the error "We couldn't add a buddy to the group":

This seems to be a limitation placed on the lower-cost CAP licenses.  If you need this capability you could use the more expensive Meeting Room Standard license or an E1 license on the accounts, yet still configure them with Common Area Phone behavior as covered in this article:

http://blog.schertz.name/2020/04/common-area-phones-in-microsoft-teams/

[#3]

As a workaround you can try to add fake SIP and SMTP records to common area phones account in AD attr. proxyaddress + add sip to msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress in format of user@domain

Also with previous Teams app was possible to make a call to CAP account and then add it to favorites from the Call History not sure if it still works.