Direct Communication, contact list and calls

[KagutsuchiUK]

Hi everyone, Ok,

I'm new to teams and have been using it for some time now for work doing the usual (getting invited to meetings, sending meeting invites etc.).For context, we have 2 companies, Company A and Company B.  I'm in Company A, which is located in the UK, and Company B is located in South Africa. 

I have email accounts for both, but I'm using(for now and the foreseeable future) the email logging for Company A.

The scenario : I want to call a person in company B to discuss something (perhaps even a client outside the company).

What Happens:  I try to call the person by going to the calls tab (which opens to "personal", I go to the search bar and search for the persons name.  It pops up, I click on his name and press "call".  Teams forwards me directly to voicemail.  Annoyed by this, use another service (in this case WhatsApp) to call the person and ask why is is not online.  After a lot of collaboration, he shows me that he is online, I disagree and show him that he is offline on my end.  I'm getting more frustrated now, because what is it.  Is he offline or is he online, because teams is telling me he is both. Next I go to the contact list and there is naturally no contacts there, so I add him as a contact.  Again teams shows that he is offline.  I again use another software and the same thing above happens.  He is offline on my end, but online on his end. Why can I not call my colleague in Company B or one of my clients b?

[#2]

@KagutsuchiUK Can you send him a chat message? Where does that end up?

My guess is that he also has a gust account in your Company A tenant, so the calls/messages are ending up there, while he's working in Company B tenant.

I would recommend you both update to the new Teams Client, a key new feature it support is multi-tenant notifications i.e. he will see the new message/call whichever tenant he is working in. See New Microsoft Teams – Microsoft Adoption

You also would probably benefit from having these two tenants in an MTO which blurs the boundary between tenants much more, but it's a new preview feature just launched see Announcing more seamless collaboration in Microsoft Teams for multi-tenant organizations - Microsoft...

[#3]

What Steven said plus if it's not him having an account in your tenant, it's possible his call settings are set to forward straight to voicemail. This is default setting for a lot of users I've seen and unless it's been changed where forward all calls is turned on in call settings to voicemail for whatever reason. Make sure he doesn't have that on. Probably not, but if he doesn't get calls usually in Teams this could be another possibility.

[#4]

Hi Steven, I can send him a message, but in the chat window it just still shows him as offline, but there is a (guest) next to his name? I read the article you sent and there could be some assistance there, but I'm not sure at this stage. I will ask our IT guys to give us the new teams and see if that works (i really doubt it at this stage). I tried to create a "shared channel", but that did not work. I cannot invite him via name or email. It just does not give me the option(it just says "cant share this channel with this org or cannot find this person") . I really don't understand why it is this difficult and complicated to make simple calls to people on the same software. All I want is a list of contacts that I can call. When the person is online, it should ring on his side, when he is busy, it should send him a notification or something similar, when he is offline, it should show him as offline and forward to voice mail. Similar to skype, or ICQ etc. At this stage, I swear I'm gonna suggest migrating to discord or something more simple. It appears more and more to me that teams is basically just to collaborate to people within your own organization and not really meant to deal with clients and other people outside your organisation

[#5 · Accepted solution]

Ok I found the problem for those that want to know. It is probably connected to what Steven said. So when I went to the search bar to search for the person I want to add to the contact list, his name would appear with a (guest) next to it. If I added that one, then it did not work (I assume that is the guest thing Steven mentioned above). So every time I added messaged or called him, it showed him as offline.

I discovered, that if I search form him on the search bar (as before), then after a couple of seconds, there appears an item right at the bottom that says (search for ........ externally). If I add him from that, then I can call, connect and message him no problem.. (A bit dumb in my opinion, since it is the same person with the same email address).