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Jeff_Schertz
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Joined Apr 01, 2019
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Re: Common Area Phones \ Shared phones with resource accounts
The Common Area Phone license would be the lowest-cost option to address that scenario. You wouldn't use a service number, you would assign a PSTN number to a user account like any other user, but the account itself will then be configured for the Common Area Phone experience. The licensing allow the use to sign into the Teams phone and place/receive calls with other Teams users and PSTN numbers.Re: Calling Common Area Phones
Mariam Penman This is the expected behavior as it appears that any user accounts with a "Common Area Phone" license applied to them cannot be added to any contact groups in the Teams client. As you've discovered you can search for them: But attempts to add them to a contacts list will produce the error "We couldn't add a buddy to the group": This seems to be a limitation placed on the lower-cost CAP licenses. If you need this capability you could use the more expensive Meeting Room Standard license or an E1 license on the accounts, yet still configure them with Common Area Phone behavior as covered in this article: http://blog.schertz.name/2020/04/common-area-phones-in-microsoft-teams/Re: Understanding Teams Conference Calls
mmaus0891 You don't request numbers, that's automatic. You simply purchase licenses for each user, which your E5 licenses already include Audio Conferencing, so you're covered there. All users in your organization will have the audio dial-in information in their Teams meetings provided. The user's region/location controls which of Microsoft's numbers are provided in the Teams meeting invite, but all invites include a link to a page which lists all of Microsoft's PSTN dial-in numbers worldwide (https://dialin.teams.microsoft.com/) so attendees can select a different local number for themselves if they don't want to call the one shown in the invite. This is all automatic and you don't have to do anything. There are some caveats you'll want to be aware of when it comes to available minutes and charges for people dialing out to PSTN participants in meetings: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/audio-conferencing-subscription-dial-outRe: Teams Meeting Question regarding PIN
Jeff Kinder There is no concept of a internal or external meeting as all Teams meeting invitations are formatted the same, regardless of who the recipients are. You really should not be deleting those links as (1) that does sound like a huge pain and (2) Teams and Outlook can automatically refresh/correct the join information in some cases, so your attempts to remove that text is ultimately in vain. The correct approach is to train your own users on how to understand their meeting invitations. External parties typically a used to joining meetings for all sorts of platforms (e.g. Skype, Zoom, WebEx, etc) and all of these invites provide extraneous information. Joining the meeting is as simple as using the main 'Join' link in all of these. If someone outside your org does click on those links they won't be able to do anything from there, unless they are Teams users themselves and at that point they typically would understand what they are for anyway (and thus not click on them in the first place).Re: 'Meeting Room' license vs 'Common Area Phone' license vs 'E1+Phone System' license
Steve Bedwell There has been some back and forth on this topic over time. Originally Microsoft did not intend for the CAP account in Skype for Business to be mailbox enabled and mentioned that Exchange Online might be pulled from that license. But now that the license will be used by Teams that is likely not going to happen. The behavior I do see currently is that if a Common Area Phone license (or a Meeting Room license) is added to a standard User mailbox account, its mailbox will vanish (but it will return if a regular license is reapplied). But if those licenses are assigned to an account with a Room mailbox and enabled using the CsMeetingRoom cmdlets then the mailbox will be fine. It appears that using those device licenses on a user account causes the mailbox to be blocked, by design.Re: 'Meeting Room' license vs 'Common Area Phone' license vs 'E1+Phone System' license
DEBEL77 The main difference between Common Area Phone and Meeting Room licenses is that the CAP license does not support Exchange, while the Meeting Room licenses does. Common Area Phones which simply are used to place audio calls are what the CAP license was designed for, and bookable rooms where users join meetings from a calendar are what the Meeting Room license was created for.Re: 'Meeting Room' license vs 'Common Area Phone' license vs 'E1+Phone System' license
LinusCansby While devices accounts are not used to send meeting invitations, the devices still need to be licensed with Audio Conferencing to cover one specific capability: inviting PSTN attendees ad-hoc to an active meeting from the device. Meaning that if someone is in the room, connected to a Skype or Teams meeting and they use the device to 'Add a Participant' and then select a PSTN phone number as the new attendee, the outbound PSTN call placed by the meeting MCU requires that the device is licensed with Audio Conferencing.
