Chief Exec / Senior Manager --> PA call group

[TheGarrison]

Hi there,

I did try to search the forum for this but found nothing which is a surprise.

We are trying to replicate a setup on SfB we had now on Teams that Immediately Diverts ALL calls (external and internal) to a group of PA's and then if a call is in fact needed to go to the CEO they can simply transfer the call and ring said person. 

In SfB we had Private lines which made this very easy.

However, having difficulty with the second half of the config, the 3 people in the call group thats getting the diverted calls cant ring the manager as they are on a permanent divert to the call group!

Can anyone advise on if they have been able to achieve this scenario?

[#2]

@TheGarrison Shouldn't the PAs be delegates of the CEO, not just part of a call group.

Share a phone line with a delegate (microsoft.com)

[#3]

@Steven Collier 

Yes, that partly addresses it but i should have expanded on the issue.

During the 8:30am to 5pm time window while the PA's are working its fine, outside of these hours, what happens if the PA's are offline?

In the SfB world we essentially diverted all calls for the CEO account to hunt group, this had a working hours on the workflow of 8:30 to 5pm, the offline hours was set to direct to the CEO so they could still answer calls in the evenings or weekend.

During the day the PA's could simply call the private line.

Teams, as with many things we are realising, is simply lacking many of the useful features we had on SfB.

Cheers

[#4]

@TheGarrison What are you using for Teams PSTN connectivity? Do you have Direct Routing with control over the SBC appliances? A solution may be achievable if so. If you don't have ownership of the SBC(s) or are on Calling Plans etc. then less so, but perhaps still achievable.

My immediate thought would be to put the CEO's non-private number on an Auto Attendant which has the same business hours as your legacy workflow and assign the existing private number as the CEO's Teams number. Create a Call Queue that contains the PA's. During working hours calls to the CEO non-private number will be routed to the PA Call Queue, and they can transfer calls by name or number to the CEO. During out of business hours you can configure the Auto Attendant to route to the CEO by name or number.

The problem is caused by virtue of the fact your existing solution needs the CEO to have 2 numbers. This can't be achieved, so you need to move one of those numbers - in this case to an Auto Attendant that will then allow you to retain similar functionality.

Would that work?

Also, is this just for a single CEO, or a configuration that needs to work for a number of C-Level persons?

[#5]

@Ben Donaldson 

Hi, we are on Direct routing and have access to sip trunk call manager.

The scenario you mention above moving the number from the CEO over to the hunt group only really addresses external calls, user that are inside the organisation don't dial a DDI, they locate the person via the directory and then call them, and if 6pm at night will honour the blanket forward and will never get to said manager. he call queue addresses the problem as we can use the auto attendant but it doesnt help as the out of hours destination would need to be the CEO but user is on a blanket forward to delegates...

I had thought of puting in a call queue yes and it almost fits the bill but as we cant assign the private lines it breaks down during the out of hours window because the CEO would have the blanket forward all calls to the Call queue.

Unless im missing something...

Ideally, we would want to roll this out to around 7-8 people as we did in the SfB world. Seems a simple thing to address from a MS end, why don't they allow private lines anymore, or simply just allow to add a 2nd -PhoneNumber

[#6]

@TheGarrison Understood.

I think you could still work around it by virtue of the fact that call queues dont honour call forwarding (so could add the CEO account into a call queue to work around the blanket forward), and by having a scheduled task run the associated PowerShell for changing call forwarding settings on the account at the required business hours.

It would indeed be a bit messy, perhaps to the point where it's worth acknowledging the limitation in this area and setting new user expectations / behaviours.

I'll have hands on later so will have a further look rather than off the top of my head.

[#7]

@TheGarrison Maybe this can be achieved by changing the CEOs call answering rules on a schedule. During the day they have 'forward all calls to delegates' and by night it's 'call me and also ring delegates'.

The users setting can be set through powershell with Set-CsUserCallingSettings (MicrosoftTeamsPowerShell) | Microsoft Docs. Then to schedule it build a runbook in Azure Automation to run at the appropriate times. Azure Automation is pretty easy to use and not expensive.

[#8]

Thanks Steve, this looks like a possibility, although ive never heard of Runbooks in Azure so will need to read up now.

You say its not "not expensive" are you saying there will be a fee to do this?

It gets worse, not only has the move to teams been more expensive but possible additional costs for loss of features it introduces, Microsoft really are on to a winner with this price model.

[#9]

@TheGarrison Azure Automation is an Azure service, there is an amount available on a free basis, then a per minutely cost based on how long your scripts take to run. I can't really see how just this requirement would take you above the free amount. Detail at Pricing - Automation | Microsoft Azure

Of course this is only an option to run a PowerShell on a schedule, you could run it from your own network if you have a suitable machine etc. 

Things get more expensive over time, that's why we have inflation, not much you can do about it. The best approach for a business is to extract as much business value out of their licenses as possible. There are many things that you'll be able to do with Teams that never existed in SfB. The key is to be flexible, sometimes the cloud doesn't allow you to do all the things you used to, but given over a million organisations use Teams it's clearly capable of supporting typical requirements.