Skype for Business Ignite Blog articles

Ignite 2018 - BRK3229 Everything you need to know about Skype for Business Server

Jonathan McKinney — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 21:53:36 GMT

Microsoft Ignite BRK3229 Session Page
Slide Deck

I had the honor of writing a summary of the Microsoft Ignite session "BRK3229 Everything you need to know about Skype for Business Server" that was delivered by Vibhor Agarwal and Rahul Gupta who are both Principal Program Managers for Skype for Business.

Both Vibhor and Rahul balanced well the messages about Migration to Microsoft Teams for some customers that are ready while simultaneously continuing to make investments in on-premises Skype for Business Server.

Features for the General Availability Release

Microsoft is calling this next release of Skype for Business Server 2019 as an IT Pro and Voice Centric release. Although having new user facing features is fun, Microsoft is focusing on taking some time to get feedback from customers and the community about what are areas are important to them. Based on the response of the crowd throughout the session, The Skype for Business Server Product Group is hitting the mark.

A big item that Microsoft has worked on for this release is bringing in the optimizations and quality improvements to Skype for Business Server 2019 that were the result of running Skype for Business in Microsoft's cloud.

Some other key features being delivered for the GA release targeted for end of 2018 are Cloud Voicemail, Cloud Org Auto Attendant, Cloud Call Data Connector and Streamlined Teams Migration.

Cloud Voice Mail

Cloud Voice Mail is the Voice Mail that will be used for Skype for Business 2019 instead of Exchange Unified Messaging. Exchange Unified Messaging was the voice mail that was available in the past for Online tenants. Cloud Voice Mail, like Exchange Unified Messaging, will still store messages in the user's mailbox. This mailbox can be on-premises or online. In order to use Cloud Voice Mail, there is a requirement for the hybrid configuration to be completed with sync of users to Azure Active Directory.

For those still wanting to continue on with the Exchange Unified Messaging experience, Skype for Business Server 2019 will support Exchange Unified Messaging through Exchange 2013 or 2016 implementations that are on-premises.

Cloud Org Auto Attendant

Cloud Org Auto Attendant allows Skype for Business Server 2019 on-premises deployments to find and route calls to specific users. Similar to Cloud Voice Mail, Microsoft is utilizing cloud features to move away from Exchange Unified Messaging Auto Attendants. Later this year, Microsoft plans to also allow an on-premises number to route directly to the Cloud Org Auto Attendant rather than having to provision a number from the cloud. Customers, for this feature, will also have a requirement for their hybrid configuration be completed and for their users to be syncing to the Azure Active Directory.

Cloud Call Data Collector

Cloud Call Data Collector is a key new feature that brings together both Skype for Business Server 2019 and Microsoft Teams call data and metrics for a unified view of a customers call quality data. Reports pull together user information from online and on-premises and gives IT Pros and Administrators one place to troubleshoot calling issues especially voice quality.

In order to utilize Call Data Connector, the configuration will need to be set using a new PowerShell cmdlet called "Set-CSCloudCallDataConnector"

Streamlined Migration to Teams

For customers that are targeting a Migration to Microsoft Teams, Microsoft is removing the need to first migrate the user to Skype for Business Online first before changing the Microsoft Teams Upgrade Policy. Now, with a new PowerShell cmdlet or using the Skype for Business control Panel that utilizes your Tenant credentials, users will be migrated directly to Microsoft Teams simplifying the process for Administrators. This will also be available for Skype for Business 2015 through a Cumulative Update. Streamlined Migration to Microsoft Teams has a requirement of a hybrid configuration and for users to be synced to Azure Active Directory.

Skype for Business Server 2019 Hardware Requirements and Engineering

For Skype for Business Server 2019, hardware requirements have increased. All server roles now require an Intel Xeon E5-2673 v3 Dual Processor 2.4 Ghz with 6-cores or higher. Additionally Front Ends and Back Ends now require 64 GB of RAM.

Supported number of users per server engineering numbers do not change for Skype for Business Server 2019, but Microsoft does allow 16 servers now in a single pool. That increases the max number of users support in a single pool to be 106,000 from 80,000. Stand-alone Mediation servers now support up to 2000 sessions with the new hardware requirements. Vibhor also stated that they are seeing a 40% reduction is CPU utilization when using the new hardware requirements.

Changes to Existing Features of Skype for Business Server 2019

Microsoft also highlighted key features changes from Skype for Business Server 2015 around the areas of Persistent Chat, XMPP Gateway, Survivable Branch Appliance, SQL Mirroring, and in-place upgrade.

Persistent Chat at Microsoft Ignite 2017 was communicated that it was going to be deprecated. Microsoft has now decided to allow for a supported configuration of having Persistent Chat in Skype for Business 2015 be available to users homed to a Skype for Business 2019 pool.

XMPP server has had no change from Microsoft Ignite 2017 and is planned to be deprecated from Skype for Business Server 2019. Microsoft stated that solutions that were utilizing this functionality to work with Skype for Business Server 2019 are being encouraged to utilize other interfaces and APIs to allow that interoperability.

The messaging from Microsoft Ignite 2017 around Survivable Branch Appliances (SBA) hasn't changed. Skype for Business Server 2019 will be supported with 2015 SBAs associated with them in the Topology Builder.

With the requirement for SQL 2016 now for Skype for Business Server 2019, SQL Mirroring support is now deprecated. SQL Mirroring is now replaced by SQL Always On functionality. As a side note, SQL Clustering is still supported.

Microsoft also has decided not to support In-Place upgrade for Skype for Business 2019. Vibhor stated that when they talked with customers that upgraded to Skype for Business 2015, most still made the choice to do a Side-by-Side migration instead an In-Place Upgrade largely driven by the desire to upgrade hardware at the same time.

Supported upgrade paths are Lync Server 2013 to Skype for Business Server 2019 or Skype for Business Server 2015 to Skype for Business Server 2019. As with all previous upgrades, Tri-Existence is not supported. Customers will need to be either completely on Lync Server 2013 or Skype for Business 2015.

Client wise, Microsoft will support the following clients:

Skype for Business 2019 Windows Desktop
Skype for Business 2016 Windows Desktop
Skype for Business Mac Desktop
Skype for Business Mobile on iOS
Skype for Business Mobile on Android
Skype for Business Web Meetings app for Windows and Mac
Skype for Business Futures

Planned New Features after General Availability

After initially teasing the audience at the beginning of the session, Vibhor and Rahul strategically revealed features that are planned after GA delivered through Cumulative Updates. These are *planned* and not a promise, but it isn't an exaggeration to state that the audience was on the edge of their seats.

The first reveal was that SEFAUtil will be moved in to a PowerShell based interface. The audience erupted into spontaneous approval and you could feel the energy in the room building.

Next, they revealed plans to replace the Silverlight based Skype for Business Control Panel with HTML 5 based Modern Control Panel. Again, the audience erupted into spontaneous approval.

Thirdly they revealed their plans to allow for Meetings in the Cloud utilizing functionality with Microsoft Teams. This is the first time they referred to their "Meetings First" strategy.

After that, they dropped what might have been the biggest shocker of the session. Response Groups become first class citizens with the Backup Service and will be able to participate in High Availability and Disaster Recovery Scenarios.

Vibhor and Rahul could have stopped there, but they revealed one last planned feature. The ability to use Cloud Call Queues with Skype for Business Server 2019 on-premises.

To really take it up a notch, to an audience that was already dazed, Rahul then proceeded to actually demonstrate a preview of the new SEFAUtil PowerShell interface with live demo of actually calling a user after change and then proceeded to demo an early version of the HTML 5 based Modern Control Panel.

After finishing up the session, referring attendees to BRK3124 How Skype for Business on-premises customers can take advantage of Microsoft Teams Meeting and BRK3142 Planning a seamless migration from Skype for Business to Teams for IT Admins, Vibhor and Rahul had a flood of people coming up to them asking additional questions that had to be continued quite some time after the session in the hallways.

It was clear that the direction that Vibhor and Rahul communicated with customers today resonated well and shows that continued investment in Skype for Business Server is something that customers are really responding to.

Jonathan McKinney is an Office Apps and Services MVP specializing in Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams. You can find him on Twitter at @ucomsgeek and on LinkedIn. He can also be found at ucomsGeek blog. He currently is a Senior UC Architect for Time2Market and lives in Elizabeth, CO.

BRK2004 - Learn from large scale Skype for Business Voice deployments

Jonathan McKinney — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 23:33:32 GMT

Session information and recording with slide deck can be found on MyIgnite

Francois Doremieux opened up the session with some impressive statistics about Skype for Business (based on third party data):

About 15 million Skype for Business Enterprise Voice monthly active users
92% of US EPG have or plan to deploy Skype for Business Enterprise Voice (33% have and 59% plan)
Microsoft is preferred as PBX vendor over Cisco by more than a 2:1 ratio
Lync/Skype for Business has 35% of the World wide Enterprise Voice lines shipped vs. 15% for the closest competitor (Cisco), who has been seeing its share decline.

Francois confirmed that interest in the room by asking the audience to raise their hand if they were contemplating or just starting a PBX replacement project using Skype for Business. Out of the 400 attendees, I would say that more than 3 quarters raised their hand!

Francois then discussed how Microsoft turned Skype for Business into a proven, mature, complete and comprehensive PBX replacement solution: “I am confident that we can succeed at any PBX replacement project; PBX replacement projects are complex and can be difficult, but I have yet to encounter a solution where the combination of Microsoft and our ecosystem was not able to meet the customer’s needs”.

In support of that claim, Francois asked four companies to describe their Large Enterprise Voice Deployments. It was clear when these companies shared the details, that they were all convinced they had made the right choice with Skype for Business Server. Still, these customers presented complex use cases, much beyond the basic and simple “white collar” use case; these deployments were far from straightforward. Tremendous work and dedication were all a part of each of these deployments, and each was unique in its own way.

BNSF Railway

BNSF Railway, represented by Silvina Petersilge, was first to talk about their deployment. They currently have 170+ Multivendor PBX sites with 30,000 digital and analog stations. The main driver for the project is their aging PBX infrastructure some of which are older than their youngest train engineers. Having moved 7 sites already with 4,700 Skype for Business voice lines, 300 faxes and 50 analog voice lines, BNSF still has a lot of work to complete. On top of consolidating PRIs to centralized SIP trunks and implementing a company-wide e911 system, BNSF plans to migrate the remaining sites through 2021, at which point all the PBXs will have been decommissioned and BNSF will be completely running on Skype for Business Server Enterprise Voice.

Along the way there were some challenges. BNSF highlighted vendor interop at the top of their list citing BTOE (Better Together over Ethernet), call recording and support for analog devices. True to the saying "The Railroad Never Sleeps", they also highlighted challenges patching in a 24x7 operation, stating that early on it was quite unsettling for users when their phones briefly lost service during the patching process. For their successes, BNSF highlighted that the users have really taken to desktop sharing and online meetings. They also have some users migrating to just headsets after a training program highlighted the benefits of being able to work from anywhere. BNSF added that they are seeing a continued increase in video usage.

Key to their successful rollouts so far have been usage of tools that give an end to end view of the network. BNSF emphasized in their lessons learned that following Microsoft's specs and baseline security recommendations are key to a successful rollout, especially when rolling out Virtual Machines.

Cargill

Cargill is a provider of food, agricultural, financial and industrial products. They are the largest privately owned company with 1200+ locations, operating in 70 countries. Currently Cargill has 160,000 employees, and they have been in business for 152 years.

Joe Milledge shared very impressive numbers about Skype for Business Enterprise Voice at Cargill:

5 Pools Globally
80,000 IM&P Clients
8,000 Enterprise Voice users currently and 13,000 planned by July 1, 2018
25 million minutes per month (using analytics to target new potential users)
Federated with 400+ companies
Installed 8 Skype native immersive Room systems in the last year (that have already paid for themselves)

Cargill’s voice progression started with proof of concept back in 2011. Started with low risk and low cost sites in 2012 and then proceeded to roll out in their "Open Office" environments at their headquarters in 2015. In 2017, they rolled out Skype for Business to 9 Large Plant locations replacing Avaya PBXs between March 2017 and July 2017. Total numbers for those 9 Large Plants were 3000 users, 1000 analog, 600 Common Area Phones and 20 Response Groups.

Key to the Cargill strategy was to utilize select employee champions to help with change management. This allowed for fewer IT resources when rolling out Enterprise Voice and was one of their key lessons learned. In total for each of their most recent Large Plant Conversions they had 4 people on-site, 2 people off-site on top of the assistance from the employees. Cargill also brought in AudioCodes to come on-site and augment the on-site staff.

Cargill found that 90% of the time there was no need to perform station reviews. One item that really helped was to set expectations with users regarding the fact that they were getting a new generation phone system that was 18 years newer than what they had before and it will function differently in some cases. They also hedged their deployment by connecting PRI to old PBX for a period of time to make sure nothing was missed or to allow for transition in chunks/sections rather than the entire site.

A gotcha that Cargill came across was the amount of time needed to setup shared phones for UM and Common Area Phones. They also noted that Response Groups were needed to perform basic hunting function. Cargill deployed high density gateways and found they were easy to register phones, but preferred to do analog administration in GUI in SfB. Cargill also found that BToE was difficult for IT to manage.

Bosch

Bosch has four different business sectors, with more than 440 subsidiary companies and regional subsidiaries in some 60 countries. Bosch started it's rollout in 2014 and has rolled out Skype for Business to 304,000 users with 210,000 of those active on a daily basis. Of those users rolled out, 74,374 are enabled for Enterprise Voice with plans to grow to 150,000 in the immediate future. Those users generate about 5.9 million minutes of PSTN calls per month. Bosch currently has 10 pools worldwide and plans to grow to 12.

Jasmin Gokovic also provided some stats on their conferencing usage racking up about 44,000 conference calls per day and 71 million minutes a month of usage. Key to Bosch's strategy is that they have developed a factory like rollout procedure with many vendors and internal departments involved. Bosch has partnered with AudioCodes and Avaya. Avaya has helped with speeding up the Enterprise Voice rollouts. Contact Center wise, Bosch is looking for a Call Center partner on Skype for Business, currently all of their contact centers are still being served by Avaya PBXs. Bosch is also looking at doing a pilot for Microsoft Teams.

Overall Bosch has 3 hubs that have a DMZ, SIP Trunks, and SBCs servicing their users. They also stated they have open federation with 695 different federated domains.

ZF is a global leader in driveline and chassis technology as well as active and passive safety technology. ZF is running their Skype for Business system in Hybrid mode. There are 61,000 users on-premises of which 16,000 are using Enterprise Voice. ZF also have 33,000 users without Enterprise Voice homed to Office 365.

Eugene Kozoil provided details on what their sites looked like before migration. EMEA region had about 30,000 users on Siemen's HiPath and Unify Openscape. They had contact center, switchboard/attendant users, Boss/Admin scenarios, 1000s of analog devices, door openers, security intercoms and 10,000 DECT based extensions.

In North America, Cisco CUCM was deployed for about 4,000 users. In that region they also had, Cisco Contact Center Express, Jabber, Intercoms, and 1,000s of analog devices. Central America had about 1,000 users with a combination of Avaya and Nortel PBXs. Lastly, Asia and South America had about 7,000 users and used a combination of Siemen's Hipath and Unify Openscape Voice.

ZF started their rollout in March 2015 but there was a 4-5 year time period where they conceptualized the project and then 8-9 months of laying out the infrastructure. ZF completed the European sites in May of 2017 and have now kicked off their Phase 2 rollouts (January 2017) in Mexico, UK, Brazil, Thailand and India.

ZF has plans to Pilot CloudPBX, now known as Phone System and utilize Cloud Connector Edition as part of that Pilot. They also plan to pilot Microsoft Teams as well.

ZF stated reasons for their success included an already existing demand for UC and user mobility. They also devised a comprehensive communications plan with on-site and remote trainings provided to users. ZF also made sure that there was training documentation created for every feature in 7 different languages.

Finally ZF standardized their migration approach with an end device portfolio and defining a roles and responsibilities for migration.

Key challenges they had were missing PBX features such as Busy on Busy (now available), end to end monitoring and many dependencies to 3rd products such as firewalls, load balancers, proxies, databases, servers, hypervisors, end devices, and WAN/LAN network gear and the QoS configurations on that network gear. Those dependencies demanded some evolution in maturity of operational rigor. Lessons learned for ZF had "Standardize, Standardize, Standardize" at the top of their list. The more you can standardize you can eliminate complexity in your environment. ZF tackled this during their first couple of sites.

AudioCodes

AudioCodes, represented by Eric Bauer, has been in the business of voice enabling Microsoft since OCS 2007 R2 days. AudioCodes works in a 100 different countries and in the last 5 years, they have deployed over 11 million VoIP gateway ports in support of SfB Enterprise Voice. They also stated that they voice enabled over 10 million Enterprise Voice seats, while also helping with analog and fax workloads. Coupled with their endpoint devices they play a critical role in filling in some of the gaps to complete the Microsoft Unified Communications ecosystem.

Q&A

Question for Cargill: Are the traders at Cargill using Skype for Business?

Cargill answer: Until SmartTap recording was deployed, Cargill would not allow the traders on Skype for Business, but now they are.

Question For Cargill: Is the UCC team or the Client supporting the Skype for Business platform?

Cargill answer: UCC team is responsible

Question for all: Was there a strategy for standardizing or managing codecs and bandwidth usage with relation to real-time media workloads like conferncing, peer to peer etc?

ZF answer: Out of the box the codecs were not modified
AudioCodes answer: Customers don't actively manage codecs.
Cargill answer: purpose built the WANs for the Codecs being used. Cargill noticed a decrease in the poor call percentage as a result of Silk.
ZF answer: Received feedback as to the increase in quality of the Silk codec from G.729.
Bosch answer: Bandwidth consumption has increased as Web conferencing was introduced in part due to higher usage. They used WebEx before in the cloud. When they did a network analysis, the bandwith increased double or triple what was experienced before as adoption increased.

Question for all: what is experience or challenges implementing softphones?

BNSF answer: Went with hard phones to help with transition. As BNSF gives users phone, they also give headset and train them on the experience. Slowly the users are transitioning to headsets. Headset with PC is much easier to support than deskphone.
Bosch answer: Strategy was soft client with 90% soft client and 10% deskphone, but the challenge was user acceptance. Bosch also had challenges fighting for resources on the local machine and headset providers software needing to have settings tweaked.
ZF answer: Anticipated 60/40 and ended up with 90% headsets. There was a delay with some site migrations because older laptops needed a hardware refresh.

Question for all: is anyone using VDI?

Bosch answer: VDI is available with a limited set of functionality. There is no enterprise voice yet.
ZF answer: got Citrix working but it wasn't a long term strategy for us.

Question for all: Is Exchange Online or on-premises used for Unified Messaging? Also are Auto Attendants used?

ZF answer: ZF has Exchange UM on-premises. Exchange team has started the hybrid cloud journey and has started the process of testing that out. For Auto Attendants pay attention to latency. ZF has their Exchange environment centrally located and for example some sites in Mexico experienced delays. Overall it was a great experience. ZF had concerns about WAN outages, but they worked with AudioCodes to route to a failover number to an operator extension.
Cargill answer: Unified Messaging is on-premises and about half their mailboxes (45,000) are in the cloud.
BNSF answer: Unified Messaging is in Office 365. BNSF Migrated Unified Messagine online at the same time that Exchage migrated to the cloud. Skype for Business is on-premises and Unified Messaging is in the cloud.

Question for all: Do you also use all the other features like whiteboard, video conferencing, file sharing and how did that affect your bandwidth?

BNSF answer: Our users use the online meeting but are not very keen on the video. BNSF does bandwidth calculation previous to the migration and they perform a site remediation. They make add bandwidth, make sure there is no Cat 3 wiring, etc.
Bosch answer: we use all those features, but one thing that helped us we introduced the Office Online server for PowerPoint presentations. That helps a lot with bandwidth consumption and they are pushing hard to educate users to present PowerPoints the right way and not use screen share.

Question for all: Faxing is a big issue coming from a hybrid environment. Have you had issues after porting fax machines?

ZF answer: We have a fax server solution we left in place. For stand alone fax systems we used AudioCodes MediaPacks. We had to play with them for a bit, but in the end it has worked out.
BNSF answer: There are some fax machines that are too old and we had to replace them. So far we've been able to make faxes work without much challenges.
Bosch answer: We left faxes out of Skype for Business and routing through AudioCodes.

Question for all: What is used for end-to-end monitoring for call quality?

ZF answer: We don't have end to end monitoring. It depends on how far you want to go. You have your Lync/Skype for Business monitoring reports, which is a good place to start. There is also Statisics Manager from Microsoft, which is another tool that gets closer to that goal. We run AudioCodes Session Experience Manager and Microsoft's CQM/CQD. At some point you have to look at VMWare and look at the server performance. The challenge is to get all that together. To start out out in one place and then dive down in the different systems.
Bosch answer: The closest we got was AudioCodes EMS. We have to use many many different tools.
Cargill answer: Sometimes we use complaints from our users like a canary in a coal mine. They tend to fix all our WAN and LAN issues because it is Skype for Business that tends to uncover those issues first.

Jonathan McKinney is an Office Server and Services MVP specializing in Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams. You can find him on Twitter at @ucomsgeek and on LinkedIn. He can also be found at ucomsGeek blog. He currently is a Senior UC Architect for Time2Market and lives in Elizabeth, CO.

Decipher delegation: Nine things you should know (MSIgnite, BRK3007)

Ram Ojha — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 15:55:39 GMT

During this session (BRK3007, Microsoft Ignite) James Poolton (Microsoft) & Ståle Hansen (Founder & Principal Architect, CloudWay) discussed delegation in detail. During the session, they discussed following aspects of delegation;

About delegation, meeting & calling scenarios
Planning & migration considerations
Client & configuration considerations
Troubleshooting & best Practices

Delegation & It’s Importance?

Historically, delegation is also referred as boss/admin feature in Microsoft Lync or Skype for Business. In this scenario, delegator is the boss & delegate is the admin. Delegation allows to setup meetings on behalf of the delegator by a delegate. A delegate can place and receive phone calls on behalf of the delegator.

Executive teams which include executives and their assistants rely heavily on delegation features to run their daily activities. This is one of the major focus area when you configure voice solution. It determines the success or failure of a Skype for Business deployment in many cases as it’s business critical for an admin assistant to have a great experience.

It's important to note that admins (delegate) often are key influencers in their organizations and need extra training.

Meeting & Calling Scenarios

An admin (delegate) schedules the meeting with their boss’s (delegator) calendar. But, before it happens the delegation needs to be configured.

Note: A delegate needs to make sure to select delegator calendar before scheduling the meeting.

Note: in this case, Stale is the boss and "Sentralboard" is the admin.

These are the calling scenarios supported in boss-admin setup.

Inbound p2p and PSTN calls
Outbound p2p and PSTN calls
Forward Calls
Simultaneous Ring (SimRing)
Call on Behalf of
Send to Voicemail
Reply with IM

Note: Dial out requires Calling Plan (PSTN Calling).

During the session, they mentioned an important and unique sort of use case. What if, the boss does not want admins to receive Skype to Skype calls, but only PSTN calls? These are the steps that you need to follow.

Turn off simring
Set up a Call Queue
have them display the Call Queue number as outbound number Caller ID number
When someone calls back, it will call the Call Queue and the admin gets presented the call

Planning & Migration Considerations

Configuration of delegation requires a proper planning. Some of the items you need to consider during planning phase are;

Finalizing list of delegators and corresponding delegates.
Do we have existing delegate/delegator relationships in Exchange?
Do any of these relationships exist outside of exchange?
List down the features being used by delegates.
Draft the features use case in detail.
Assess implications of migrating to Skype for Business online for users who have delegate relationships
Make sure to migrate delegator and delegate at the same time
Know about the stale delegates\delegators

To discover managers with stale delegates use this script by MVP Paul Cunningham

To discover delegates with stale managers you can use this script by MVP Paul Cunningham

It is important to ensure that both Outlook and Skype for Business clients should to be running same version.

Delegation can be configured by an admin in either Exchange, Outlook or Skype for Business client. Usually, it’s a user driven activity and initiated or requested by the delegator’s office. It is important to note that SfB client configuration option only available with EV or CPBX license.

Troubleshooting & Best Practices

If there is an issue with delegation, you can begin troubleshooting with;

Misconfigured delegate setup (user behavior)
Check that delegator has added delegate correctly
Verify with MFCMAPI or delegator’s outlook client
Verify client policy (EnableExchangeDelegateSyncUp should be true)
Client policy can be checked using PowerShell or UCCAPI log file

These are the best practices that you should consider before planning and deployment of delegation.

Ensure the delegator/delegate are on the same Outlook and Skype for Business version
When MAPI shows “unavailable” try first recreating the Outlook profile on the delegators workstation
Confirm default profile
Office Repair
Old Rules to Ex-Employees
Schedule time with the delegator!

Useful Resources

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, it's important to note that admins (delegate) often are key influencers in their organizations. This makes planning and deployment of delegation a delicate part of Skype for Business project. This session was super important in this regard.

I would be glad to hear your observations\feedbacks\comments if any. You can follow me on Twitter or you can visit my LinkedIn profile to connect. I regularly blog at RTCPedia.

BRK3036: Understanding Call Queues and Auto Attendant

Christophe Boucetta — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 03:16:00 GMT

A good understanding of the Microsoft Phone System Cloud Services capabilities in Office 365 for incoming call routing is required to properly and quickly route callers to the correct destination, all without human intervention. These services, Auto Attendants and Call Queues, are the main interfaces for the callers to reach people and departments in your organization over the phone.

Key Microsoft Phone System Cloud Services concept for this session are:

Call Queues: Provides automatic call distribution that allows organizations to handle calls at scale and distribute incoming calls based on customized rules.
Auto Attendant: Provides automated call answering and route calls using numeric keypad entries and voice recognition, offering features like Directory Search and multi-level menu options.

Marina Kolomiets and Irena Andonova walked you through design, provisioning, licensing requirements, and use Call Queues and Auto Attendant concept across online and hybrid topologies.

Introduction

Marina started the presentation with an important news - the support of the hybrid tenant configurations coming soon. It’s a great news, as presently a lot of environments are hybrid, with many voice features kept on premises. This announcement will enable such organizations to also benefit by using these online features, and also remove the dependency on Exchange for Auto Attendants.

It’s possible to enable Online Users for Call Queues and Auto Attendants (Queue Agents, Operators) in two different ways:

Using calling plan licenses that are available presently in only few countries;
Enable users to be eligible for azure Phone System voice services at no extra cost by enabling them for Enterprise Voice with PowerShell cmdlet Set-CsUser -identity "User Name" -EnterpriseVoiceEnabled $true;

Note that a user without calling plan license assigned cannot have a PSTN Number and cannot place calls to external PSTN.

Marina introduced the concept of protecting the identity of users by customizing the Caller ID for outbound Calls. Available since July, it’s possible to mask or change the callback number by granting a user a certain Caller ID policy:

New-CsCallingLineIdentity -Identity "UKSalesQueue" -CallingIdSubstitute "Service"

-ServiceNumber 14258828080 -EnableUserOverride $False –Verbose

Grant-CsCallingLineIdentity -PolicyName UKSalesQueue -Identity “User Name”

Call Queues

Call Queues are part of Azure cloud Voice services available in Phone System, giving organizations the ability to handle calls at scale and be sure that all call is answered.

Even though right now each Call Queue is required to have a tolled or toll-free service number assigned to it, Marina announced that soon, a service number will be an optional parameter and Call Queue would be able to receive VOiP calls on their SIP-addresses.

Marina introduced Greeting, Music-on Hold, Queue size and maximum allowed call wait time parameters, routing for Agents (Attendant), and the ability for over-capacity and calls that timed-out waiting be handled in several ways. A lot of features are available in Call Queues to create customized experience to the callers.

Each Call Queue service number can handle up to 200 concurrent calls, and a single tenant can have multiple Queues.

Next, Marina talked about the Call Queue Agent capabilities. Agent can be added using distribution list or security groups, with support for Office 365 groups upcoming. Agent list can have 50 Agents maximal, and an Agent can be a member of multiple Queues and take calls on Desktop Client, Mac, Mobile (iPhone, iPad and Android) or IP Phones.

All IP Phone certified for Skype for Business Online are compatible with Call Queues and can be used by Agents.

Marina and Irena finished this part of the presentation with a live demonstration of how Call Queue calls can be received on Mobile Clients.

Auto Attendant

Auto Attendant provides an automated system to answer inbound phone calls to a company, play prompts to interact with the caller and determine the destination of the call.

Marina introduced through the possible multi-level IVR configuration created using Office 365 Auto Attendant and showed us how to use this service to create a customized menu system that lets external and internal callers move through the options using Speech Recognition or keypad entry (DTMF) to reach a specific user or service in an organization.

Office 365 Auto Attendants give the capabilities to upload pre-recorded customized voice prompts or use text-to-speech to create them, have different route calls based on business hours or perform directory search to locate users by using a phone keypad (DTMF) or voice inputs using speech recognition.

All the configuration can be done with the O365 portal and with PowerShell.

You can have 80,000 users in Directory search scope for Speech Recognition. Interesting that you can exclude specific users from the directory search which will be hidden from dial by name using Exclusion List.

Integration with Teams

Irena announced the upcoming Teams support for any calls placed to Auto Attendant or Call Queues, with was followed by a demonstration of a user receiving a call routed through Office 365 Auto Attendant on the Teams client.

Upcoming features

On premise environnement support

Customers using on premises deployments will be also able to use Microsoft Phone System Cloud Queues and Auto Attendants.

Discoverability in Contacts and optional service numbers

Call Queue and Auto Attendants will be discoverable for all users in Contacts, and users will be able to add them to their Contact Lists. They can also call or transfer calls to Call Queues and Auto Attendants using their Contact List in Skype for Business client.

This discoverability in Contacts will be also available for on premise environments, for users homed on premises:

Agents Opt In And Out with Call Queues

Admins will be able to grant Call Queue Agents an ability to Opt in and out of taking Call Queue calls at will. Agents will be able to see what Call Queues they have been added to, and Opt out of taking calls from certain Call Queues.

Serial routing method with call queues

A new, Serial routing method will be available and will offer a new call to the Agents one by one, as determined by the order defined by the Admin.

Holidays in Auto Attendants

It will be possible to define Holidays in Auto Attendants using the portal or PowerShell. Up to 10 date ranges can be defined for each Holiday, and Amins can choose to start and end a Holiday at a certain hour of the day.

Speech Recognition and Text To Speech

Turkish and Catalan language support is upcoming in Auto Attendants.

as part of the conitnous effot for improve voice recognition and text to speech in Phone System, high quality voices will be rolled out for French, Spanish and German.

New UI for Auto Attendants and Call Queues

End

Marina and Irena covered many topics, giving an insight into the sheer amount of services and development that goes into delivering the best user experience during incoming call.

You can learn more about Call Queues and Auto Attendant here:

Auto Attendant: http://aka.ms/sa-orgaa

Call Queues: http://aka.ms/sa-ccq

The recorded session will be available here within 2 days : https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Ignite-Content-2017/bd-p/MicrosoftIgniteContent2017

More about Marina and Irena:

Marina Kolomiets is a Senior Program Manager working on Premium Voice features in Skype for Business, focusing on Call Queues, Auto Attendants/Virtual Receptionists, and Group Calling and productivity scenarios. Link: https://myignite.microsoft.com/speaker/214948
Irena Andonova is a principal program manager in the Skype for Business group, leading Cloud phone system. Link: https://myignite.microsoft.com/speaker/190293

I’m really glad I attended this session. If you like to reach out to me, many way to find me:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/boucetta_christ

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boucettachristophe/

Blog (french): http://microsofttouch.fr/default/b/christophe/

Best-in-class authentication in Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams – BRK 4001

Tommy Clarke — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 15:45:12 GMT

Natasha has been in the Unified Communications space for over 14 years. She has worked on Live Meeting, OCS, Lync and Skype for Business. Her current area of expertise is with Security and Compliance features for Skype for Business.

Natasha kicked of the presentation with making sure that everyone understands the different acronyms and term. This was probably very smart to make sure that the audience was on the same page, since the session is full of acronyms and terms that might be unknown for some.

Modern Auth (MA)	Microsoft’s implementation of OAUTH 2.0 for client/server authentication
ADAL	“Active Directory Authentication Library” – client library used to enable MA
CBA, MFA, CA, MAM	Features enabled when use MA. MA is the prereq.
CBA	Cert Based Auth – allows user to login without a Username/Password. IT admin must install a user based cert on the device.
MFA	Multi Factor Auth • Can be enabled for all apps via O365 • Can be enabled for a single app using CA (need Intune license)
CA	Conditional Access • Allows the IT admin to only allow access based on certain conditions, usually location based or device based. For example, only allow external devices with MFA.
MDM/MAM	Mobile Device Management/Mobile Application Management • Example: Allow copy/paste for managed apps only, wipe device

More and more organizations are moving to eliminate passwords as their only method of signin and this is enabled by ADAL and Modern Authentication.
So let’s say that you want to use Certificates, Multi Factor Authentication and/or Conditional Access. Modern auth is then required to be enabled for these methods to work. The features can also be mixed as you please, so for example you could have some users that only have MFA and some that has MFA and CA. These features require MDM/MAM which is found in Intune.

To conclude, Modern auth is whats enables your organisation to move away from just passwords into a more secure and undisruptive way of signing in to services.

What is supported?

Often when troubleshooting authentication issues, the hardest part for us is to understand the topology being used, so that we can try and pinpoint the problem.
We have to account for both the Skype topology and also every other moving part like Exchange, Office client version or Mobile Clients and as you can see on the picture posted bellow, there are a lot of different parts to account for.

What is also important to keep in mind is that the S4B client is actually a client for both Skype for Business and also for Exchange.
So we need to match settings for everything to work smoothly for our users and not disrupt them with password prompts.

The clients that are supported for modern auth and the different features is found bellow.

There is also a great article at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt803262.aspx on ADAL / Modern Auth and support.

Topologies

Let’s look at the different topologies.

The first one that we will look at is Online.

Online is simple, everything is fully supported, but remember that you might need to configure/enable Modern Auth in your tenant, if you have an older tenant. For newer tenants Modern Auth is enabled by default when they are created.

Also remember that you should match settings for both Exchange and Skype so either on or off for both services, (SharePoint is already enabled by default and the requirement to match is not present for SharePoint)

The second topology is Hybrid

In a hybrid topology you can mix more settings and configuration, but depending on your settings your users might receive multiple login prompts.

When troubleshooting this it’s important to look for what prompt that pops up, it could be the “old Windows” login prompt or it could be a web based prompt, where the latter is Modern Auth.
Asking your users how the prompt looks like or having them send you a screenshot of the login prompts is often key to a fast and successful troubleshooting.

This link explains this in further details Skype for Business topologies supported with Modern Authentication

Remember that not ALL four boxes can be turned on for MA right now, but Microsoft is working hard to enable it everywhere, more on this later.

And the last topology is On-Prem

For onprem there is right now limited support, meaning that its only works on windows desktop clients, mobile clients are not supported and no Exchange integration.

But this is where the news are coming.

Microsoft is working hard on enabling Modern Auth everywhere, so we will see full support in Hybrid and Full support when you are all onprem.

But if you pay attention you’ll see that the arrows from the onprem services points on the online Auth service so it’s kind of a Hybrid with regards to involving Azure AD.

If you want to enable this for Skype for Business, a public preview program was announced during the session that enables modern auth for Skype for Business onprem.

To sign up and get to know more visit Aka.ms/skypepreview

Authentication Flows

In a traditional hybrid the first place where users authenticate is onpremise, but to turn on Modern Auth in the future for hybrid in this scenario, the authentication will be against Azure AD.

Note that the Hybrid auth flow always starts with onprem since AutoDiscover and LyncDiscover points to onprem.

So, to try and explain this in a hybrid scenario.

If a mobile client wants to login, it will ask the DNS for LyncDiscover, that will then send the client to SfB Onprem
The SfB server will look for a trust and see that it trusts AAD and says, “get a token from AAD”, where the client will be redirected to.
Since AAD is federated with ADFS, it sends the client back to your ADFS servers onprem.
The user enters creds, ADFS verifies (Since you use ADFS the users get prompted and depending on configuration the users will login with pass or Cert.)
Your ADFS servers then gives a token to the client and the client is then redirect to AAD
The client then goes to AAD with the ADFS token
AAD gives the client an access token (with one hour lifetime) and one refresh token (with 90 days lifetime)
The client gives the client access token to SfB Onprem

SfB validates the token signing authority with AAD

SfB Onprem validates the user, that then redirects it to SfB Online
SfB Online redirects the client back to AAD
The client gives the refresh token to AAD.
AAD gives the client access token to SfB client
The client then gives the client access token to SfB Online
The user is logged in to SfB, SfB cert is then given to SfB client (lifetime for this cert is 8 hours in Online and 180 days in onprem)

And that’s it! Simple right? Well that it for Skype and now the S4B client needs to auth to Exchange.

EWS login

AutoDiscover sends the client to Exchange onprem
Exch server says “get a token from AAD” and redirects.
The client sends the refresh token to AAD.
AAD gives the client access token to the SfB client
The client gives the client access token to Exchange onprem
Exchange onprem validates the user and redirects to EXO
EXO redirects the client to AAD
The client gives the refresh token to AAD.
AAD gives the client access token to SfB client
The client gives the client access token to EXO
The user is logged in to Exchange onprem

This might be confusing so I really recommend watching the recording to get a full understanding on this flow.

Tokens and lifetimes

As mentioned above AAD provides two token, the client access token has a lifetime of 1 hour, and the refresh token is 90 days but this is configurable.

You need the client token to get in to the server. If it times out it will use the refresh token to get a new and then signin.

This is true for all online services that uses Modern Auth

As I mentioned in the auth flow there is also the SFB Certificate and the lifetime is 8 hours if your client receives the cert from online and the default for an onprem topology is 180 days (this is configurable.)
Because S4B is a realtime service it was designed this way to make sure that the clients could always connect, even if the AD is down you should be able to make a call to 911 for example.

When this cert expires the client will reauthenticate with the auth model above.

Modern auth is a global setting, it cannot be enabled per pool or user, due to security.

When its turned on it adds O-auth to the list of what the servers support, it does NOT turn off the old methods, so all your old clients can still login, for example room systems (or active sync clients to Exchange.)

Enabling Modern Auth will NOT require users to reauth, but the next time the clients auth methods times out, it will reauth with Modern Auth.

If you have an onprem topology and the the user is in onprem the auth flow is the same as above but there is no redirection to online.

Teams

Teams is cloud-only so it’s much simpler, there is just one topology and no hybrid option. And the only auth that Teams does is modern auth.

The features and clients that are supported (at the time of writing) are listed below.

	Desktop		Mobile			Windows Web				Mac Web
Scenario	Win	Mac	iOS	Android	WinPhone	Edge	IE	Chrome	Firefox	Chrome
MA protocol	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x
MFA	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x
CBA	x		x	x		x	x	x	x	x
CA	x		x	x		x	x
MAM			x	x

Resources and links.

SfB HMA Public Preview
- https://aka.ms/skypepreview
- Documents

Please ask cuestions or give feedback eithere here or at twitter https://twitter.com/itommyclarke

You can find my personal blogposts at https;//www.altitude365.com/blog

BRK2010: Call quality management for Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams

StaleHansen — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 12:50:12 GMT

Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams helps you transcend geographical boundaries by connecting you to people in other locations. To succeed within an organization, you need to make sure calls get connected properly and call quality is good. What constitutes good call quality? This is highly subjective, but packet loss, jitter and latency are key network metrics you can measure. By understanding that signaling and media can take different paths, you can make sure that media has an optimal path between the sender and receiver in 1-to-1 calls and conferences. This is where call quality may get difficult to understand and master, luckily there are several tools available that we can work with such as The Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) and Call Analytics.

William starts off the session by emphasizing three key takeaways from the session

Both tools work with Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online
Use Call Analytics for help desk and to look in to individual users calls and Call Quality Dashboard for groups of calls
Both need your subnet to location data to locate the users

Troy talked about when working with call quality you can have a proactive approach and a reactive approach. Proactive is when you take steps to ensure and plan for your employees are getting a high-quality experience when they are on your corporate network. Reactive is when you respond to users report poor quality or you discover it through the tools. Beside from CQD and Call Analytics you can use the network assessment tool to measure quality from client network to Office 365. William went through the Call Quality Management tool overview

William also shared a breakdown of which tool to use for which persona

Troy went through the story and a demo of call analytics, I recommend watching the recording to for the full story and demo, absolutely worth a watch. Here are some highlights

Call Analytics shows all information of calls within 15 minutes of the call ending
- Data is organized in to device, system, connection, network
Call Analytics first gets useful when you import subnet mapping, because only then calls in your corporate environment gets classified as internal
- You can use the same subnet mapping as for CQD
- You can tell if users are on home network or corporate network
You can delegate access to tier 1, tier 2, and admin
- Tier 1 cannot see usernames and advanced and debugging tabs are hidden
  - That is good so that tier 1 won’t get too much information about calls
- Tier 2 sees all
- Admin sees all and can update subnet mapping

Troy announced that Call Analytics will contain Microsoft Teams data by the end of October with general availability end of this year. If it is a Teams meeting it will indicate it is a Teams meeting by using the correct logo the Call Analytics individual call view

William talked about the Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) and that it now supports calls from Microsoft Teams. That is good news! He again emphasized that without subnet data all call will get marked as external, so make sure you upload subnet data when you want to succeed with both tools. He had a good summary what CQD is

Single page dashboard that provides at a glance view monthly and daily trends for call quality
Detailed customizable reports with in-place live report editing
Integrates tenant subnet to building data to provide location based insights
270 dimensions over 121 measures of call quality and reliability for audio, video and application sharing
Includes end user ratings of calls
Service is hosted in Azure region based on your where your tenant is homed (NOAM, EMEA, APAC)
Currently only accessible by Skype for Business Tenant Admin role, work is being done to be able to give access to CQD without being a Tenant Admin.
CQD has 6 months of historical data
Subnet data takes 12 hours to agregate

William shared that CQD will support Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online calls and you can sort by product, both, only Skype for Business or only Microsoft Teams

William talked about how to import subnet mapping, dimensions, measures and key concepts in CQD. It is important to note that the streams you see in CQD are unidirectional, which means there are at least two streams per call. Unclassified calls are calls with not enough data to display quality correct. Typically, short calls are a big part of this list. Watch the recording for the full walkthrough and demo. CQD is to look proactively at trends within your infrastructure so you can act on it instead of having individual users call in and open support tickets.

There is a lot of training available for how to get started and how to create custom reports for CQD at http://aka.ms/MyAdvisor, which is formerly known as Skype Operations Framework

William closed off the session by mentioning that you can get user data from PowerShell with the Get-CsUserSession which only reflects Skype for Business data at the moment. The cmdlet helps you get call analytics data programmatically. He also mentioned The Network Assessment tool which verifies packet loss, jitter and latency and will support Microsoft Teams measuring as well at the end of October.

At the end they shared some useful links to get started and are great resources to revert back to when you want to succeed with call quality in Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online in your corporate environment

Call Analytics: https://adminportal.services.skypeforbusiness.com/.
CQD: https://cqd.lync.com
CQD dimensions and measures: https://aka.ms/cqd_dimensions_measures
Network Performance Targets: https://aka.ms/teams_networkquality_targets
Network Assessment Tool: https://aka.ms/teams_networkassement_tool
My Advisor: http://aka.ms/MyAdvisor

I enjoyed the session and recommend watching the recording when it comes available for full demo's at Microsoft Ignite On-Demand: https://ondemand.myignite.microsoft.com/videos

More about Troy and William

Troy Funk is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft: https://myignite.microsoft.com/speaker/189827
William Looney is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft: https://myignite.microsoft.com/speaker/189829

BRK2025: Transform your large-scale meetings with Skype Meeting Broadcast

StaleHansen — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 19:46:50 GMT

I really like Skype Meeting Broadcast for scenarios where you have a message that you want to reach a lot of people with where they can consume it on any device live or on-demand. By using the QA module people can ask questions anonymously and get answers privately or in public. Skype for Business Meeting Broadcast is available in most Office 365 SKU’s and works well for small organizations that wants to create webinars or large corporations that wants to do internal training, presentations or stream live events.

In this session Delanda Coleman and Sonu Arora walks you through Broadcast meeting lifecycle with Microsoft 365. Skype for Business Meeting Broadcast scales to over 10 000 attendees using dynamic streaming video that can be consumed on any client. You can stream from your computer or use studio grade equipment to get a good result. The stream is generated by Azure Media Services

Make sure you have the necessary pre-requisites; the base requirement is Skype for Business Plan 2.

Note: If you have a hybrid environment, you need to have a fully published ADFS setup to be able to get the producer controls. An authentication is done from Office 365 to your on-premises environment in the producer sign-in process, which requires a publicly available ADFS. I have customers that have ADFS published only internally where this fails. The workaround is to crate onmicrosoft.com users where you do the production of Skype Meeting Broadcast, or make sure ADFS is available externally

The lifecycle is a good way to make sure you catch all aspects of planning, producing, publishing and analyzing your broadcast.

Skype for Business Meeting is enabled for all bydefault, you can enable and disable the service in the Skype for Business admin portal. You can also assign policies using powershell to give individual users access to creating meetings

Get-CsMeetingBroadcastPolicy to see which plocies are available
Grant-CsBroadcastPolicy <upn> to give users the correct policy

Sonu walked us through the planning stage of the lifecycle and touched on important aspects of plannig

Getting started, what is your message, who is the audience, does it need to be live
Team, it is important that you have clearly defined roles during a broadcast like organizer, producer, contributor and presenter
Audience engagement, you can use QA module for enable attendees to ask questions and you can use Pulse to get see how many is attending live and create polls and surveys.
Hardware, what hardware do you need to get best result? Is a laptop and Skype headset enough or do you have bigger ambitions for your meeting. Maybe you want to have multiple cameras?
Bandwidth, make sure you have a good connection, preferably wired connection, test before you stream
Start scheduling your meetings at https://broadcast.skype.com
- Watch the demo to see how to schedule a meeting and the options you can set and what the join experience looks like
Use real time transcription that is currently in public preview and translation to increase reach
- Spoken Languages: 8 – English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese (Mandarin), Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian
- Translation available in over 60 languages

The basic setup of Skype for Business Broadcast is to use you own laptop and Skype for Business certified device

They then went through the setup they had set up for the session, where they were able to stream video using a video capture device.

When producing the session they highlighted the following topics

Sign in with a supported client to get the
Producer experience
- When producing you have about 30-40 second delay between the production client and the stream
- You can choose between content only, video only, content and video and
- You can not do desktop sharing, if you want to stream content from a computer, use a hdmi capture device like Magewell

They shared some great insights on streaming for basic, expanded, multiple camera sources, studio quality presentations and auditorium style scenarios

Example of studio setup

If you are using an audiotorium setup you can use a regkey to improve audio. It effectively suppresses noise cancellation, since audience applause, laughing, and so on, is often picked up as noise. Setting: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\RTC\DeviceSettings, "AudioUsageMode"=dword:00000002 will enable Broadcast Audio mode. Example of audiotorium setup

Post production is where you can

Share the video on demand via Office 365 Videos
Download a recording of the broadcast for offline viewing, editing or social posting
Download the Q & A and attendee report

For larger organizations that expect a lot of internal streaming of broadcasts there are partners that can optimize the media streams that are already available from the Azure media services. These are Kollective and Hive Streaming. A stream can come up to 1700 mbps and that can have disastrous consequences for your internet connection. What these eCDN’s do is to reduce the constraint on your internet connection and use a peering technology where clients will distribute the stream internally. This will reduce the stream from the internet to one or two per site.

To close off Delanda and Sonu shared a roadmap where Meeting Broadcast production will be available in Microsoft Teams. I look forward to seeing how the experience will be in Microsoft Teams when it comes available

The Skype for Business Broadcast series is being renamed to Teams On Air, and the October 27 episode is going to show how Microsoft does Skype Meeting Broadcast. It is going to air bi-weekly and you can experience yourself how it is to be an attendee since the they are using the meeting broadcast platform. Check it out at http://aka.ms/TeamsOnAir

The closing note was use skype meeting broadcast to empower employees, engage customers, it is all about democratizing broadcasting. I think organization will do more with this service moving forward, especially since it is being made available in Microsoft Teams. Many of the customers I talk to are not aware of this service, but many are impressed by the power of being able to stream a message easily using known technology without further investments.

It was a good session and I recommend watching the recording when it comes available to get the full scope of the demos.

Ignite Live Blog: How to transfer your business phone numbers to Microsoft

Anthony Caragol — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 03:27:58 GMT

One of the typical goals I see with Phone System (formerly Cloud PBX) even many starting with CCE, is for organizations to ultimately port their phone numbers and be all-in with the cloud. They don’t want to maintain on-premises equipment where they don’t have to, they don’t want to have to deal with telephony vendors, they want it all as a flexible subscription when possible.

At Ignite, Agus Rachman is up on stage talking about how to get this done. His objectives are to give an overview of the process, overcome some of the challenges, and walkthrough the roles and responsibilities involved. You can tell he’s been through this before, I was chatting with him a bit before the session started and he’s got some good war stories to share.

We’re starting by talking about number porting. If you’re not familiar, Agus explains that effectively, instead of dealing with circuits and phone companies, we’re going to transfer (port-in) our phone numbers to Microsoft from (port-out) our existing vendor.

Right away, he’s getting at the meat of it, talking about what we can and can’t port. In a nutshell, we can port landlines, mobile numbers (US and Puerto Rico only), toll and toll free numbers. We can do this in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain, UK and the US. In the US, we have the luxury of partial porting. This means that we can often port a handful of pilot numbers before we port our entire office. What I’m learning today is the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily work that way. In the UK, multiple parties may have to be involved, the service provider and the range holder, to determine if they’ll even allow it. There’s a simple portal to migrate numbers, if you have 999 to port or less, they're all user numbers, and you reside in the US. If you don't meet those requirements, there’s also a service desk available to you for more complex requests. If you need to port a number and use it as a service number, be aware that you'll need to request the service desk make this change for you.

So, far, it seems pretty straightforward, and from Microsoft’s side it is. The goal is to make it easy for you. If you’ve ever ported phone numbers, you know that’s rarely the case. Agus is getting into the challenges you might face. Clearly, the existing carrier isn’t happy that they’re losing your business and to that end, they don’t always jump to help you leave. Some of the challenges mentioned are missing SLAs and dates, denied requests for seemingly small reasons, and depending on the country, regulating bodies needing to get involved. The best thing you can do before you port is to ensure that you’ve got your forms filled out perfectly and you’ve planned this in advance. If you’re not sure of what information you need to enter, find out for sure before starting to avoid delays, make sure you disable any advanced calling features on the existing provider’s side that could block a port (call hunt groups, etc.) and make sure you’ve doing going too fast, mixing numbers from different providers and making other mistakes.

Agus highlights the importance of planning as well. Porting timelines are 7-14 days typically, sometimes up to 30. Personally, I’ve seen them take upwards of 60, but this is rare. Porting between tenants can happen in 1-3 days however. During the port it may take two hours or so before all of your numbers start flowing into Microsoft so be prepared for that window.

Before you port, you’re going to need a recent bill or invoice to get your account number, billing telephone number (BTN), and billing address. You’ll also need to know the service address and the numbers assigned to the BTN. If you’re unsure of this, reach out to your service provider to find out for sure as it can block a port. If you do need help verifying that a number can be ported, Microsoft can help. That’s amazing if you’ve ever dealt with number porting and know what a headache it can be between two standard carriers. In the US you can send an email to PTN@microsoft.com, in Europe you can send an email to PTNEU@microsoft.com to get help. If you have a good relationship with the existing carrier, you don’t need to be afraid to reach out to them for help as well to get advice before the port on any constraints that may slow you down. Finally, ports timelines do get missed and delays, so communicate as well as you can to your users and be prepared for those contingencies if needed.

I’m really glad I attended this session, Agus did a fantastic job and it’s because he’s been through it many times. If you like to reach out to me, I can be found on Twitter as @canthonycaragol or you can also visit my LinkedIn profile and connect.

Agus Rachman

'Live' from Ignite - MVP Guest Bloggers ready to go!

Laurie Pottmeyer — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 19:26:03 GMT

Ignite is here and there's lots of excitement! We are going to have a little fun and recap some of the Skype for Business sessions via our Microsoft Tech Community Ignite blog, here. You can find similar recaps for Microsoft Teams at aka.ms/igniteteamsblog. The best part is that these blogs will be written by our very own Office Server & Services MVPs.

Whether you are at Ignite and missed a session you wanted to see, or weren't able to make the trip, know you are just a click away from many sessions, right here. We'll try to make posts as real-time as possible. In some cases, we may be a bit delayed, but know that you've got a team on the ground here in Orlando excited to share the latest & greatest with you all.

Stay tuned for session recaps at http://aka.ms/ignitesfbblog for all things Skype for Business and http://aka.ms/igniteamsblog for all things Microsoft Teams.

For more information about the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program or to read profiles of our Office Server & Services Guest bloggers, go to mvp.microsoft.com.

@Anthony Caragol, @Johan Delimon, @Jonathan McKinney, @Matt Landis, @Loryan Strant, @Nuno Silva, @Josh Blalock, @Alexis CONIA, @Peter Frank Diaz Rosales, @Ram Ojha, @Tommy Clarke, Lasse Nordvik Wedø, Christophe Boucetta