Prospective Teams/Phone System Convert: DID Questions

[Mark_TV]

Hello community,

Our organization is evaluating Teams’ Phone System to replace or complement our PBXs. I have two questions and will provide the background. 

We have multiple offices geographically distributed, each with their own DID range and a PRI gateway/SBC. We would use direct routing, not a calling plan. The goal will be for each user to have a DID number that rings to their Teams profile. Some of our employees “permanently” move between offices when they take new jobs/positions.

Is it possible for someone to have a permanent, corporate DID number that follows them throughout their careers (consider this a DID number from HQ), and a DID number local to the branch office they work out of, with calls to either/both numbers ringing to their Teams profile?

When a user moves from one location to the other, can they remove their local DID number association from their profile themselves and then when they arrive at their new location add their new local DID number to their profile, or is this a systems administrators’ function as in the old PBX days?

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@Mark_TV There is no support for multiple numbers for one user in Teams. What you could do is to configure your SBC to configure one of the numbers to the number assigned to the user.

So if you assign the corporate number +123456789 to a user in Teams. Then configure the SBC to forward calls coming in to the local number +987654321 to +123456789.

[#3]

@Linus Cansby Thank you for the reply. I thought that may be the case. That should be acceptable, except for those who need to know what number was dialed.

To my other question, and acknowledging that there can only be one number assigned to a user in Teams, can the individual user assign their own DID number or must the systems administrator make that assignment?

I'm just trying to determine/confirm whether or not a user can make these DID number assignments. I would see that as a two-edge sword, great that they can help themselves, but I wouldn't want someone inadvertently or intentionally have calls to someone else's number ring their profile.

Thank you,

[#4]

@Mark_TV , not sure if you got your answer. Depending on the SBC used, you can integrate it with AD and from there let users self administer their DID. It will be an AD entry/modificaton, not an SBC one. You have to agree what AD attibute to use for DID management.

[#5]

Got it! Sounds like as long as we let everyone know what attribute in AD will reflect in Teams as their DID number, we can let them self-administer that number. As I think about it, if the number in AD is their corporate number that sticks with them, and their local DID number is the one that would change during one's career, there wouldn't be a need to do anything for this in AD as the local number would be routed in the local SBC which would be modified by a sys admin. 

Thank you all for helping bring clarity to where there was uncertainty. I'll return with additional questions as they arise if I can't get answers elsewhere.

[#6]

@Mark_TV , keep in mind that no two individuals can have the same DID. You also need SBC rules to manage the information.

[#7]

@JCarmonaG I read this when you first posted it and appreciate you mentioning it, but I did not think through all the possible implications. We certainly have the occasional DID number that rings to more than one person, but I'm sure this limitation goes beyond DID numbers. We have auto attendants that have options to reach groups of employees via non-DID numbers currently assigned to non-prime keys on their multi-line sets. We have a number of scenarios where more than one person share a number for one reason or another. I'm sure with PBX/communications server integration and a creative configuration, we could make something work to ring multiple employees' Teams clients, but that too will have its own limitations. For example, the employee would not be able to see what number the call came in on. Thank you for bringing this this up.

[#8]

@Mark_TV , for groups of individual working together you have 'Delegates' or 'Call Pickup Groups'; for Auto Attendants, Call queues.