tl;dr>Best choice for licensing common area phone and basic conference phone with regard to Microsoft's fairly new Teams Phone with Calling Plan?
We are setting up Teams phone for our small office. We have purchased the (seemingly new?) Teams Phone with Calling Plan license for each of our users. This works fine, all user phones can dial in and dial out. We are using Yealink MP56's in all cases above and below.
Issue 1: We have one phone in our front office that is not assigned to a user. It simply sits at a desk as a convenience in case someone is working in the front office area. We only need to be able to answer and make calls on the device, but don't really need voicemail. My thought is this should be setup as a Common Area Phone (CAP) to which I will have to add a Calling Plan; however, some of these licenses seem like they are, or will soon be deprecated. For instance, why would I not just purchase a Teams Phone with Calling Plan license for this phone at $15.00/Month? To go the CAP route requires an $8.00/Month license plus another Calling Plan license of at least $8.00 or $12.00 (aside: more confusion here, MS lists a Domestic Calling Plan at $12.00/Mo or a Domestic Calling Plan including Canada for $8.00/Mo; why would you choose the $12.00/Mo plan?). My issue here is not the additional expense, which at most is $5.00/Mo, it is more about setting it up the right way so that I don't have to change it if MS is phasing out one method in favor the of the Teams Phone with Calling Plan license.
Issue 2: We have a conference room that needs a phone. The room is nothing fancy, just a conference table and television where we can connect a laptop for presentations and the like. We like to have a phone in there so we can receive incoming calls when needed or to use the phone for conference calls simply because they are usually louder and have better quality than using someone's laptop. We have occasional conference calls with suppliers and customers, so it would be nice to have a conference bridge that we can either use in the conference room, or that users can use individually from their office if they are the only one in the building participating in the call. Does this have to be a Teams Room? How do we enable Audio Conferencing, because I read various posts that say it is included with Office 365 now, yet there is no way to enable it and no additional license I can see to purchase. All of this reminds me of the early days of O365 when licensing was a complete nightmare and it took MS years to straighten out.
