Teams Phones

[jblackburnHWGA]

I have A5 licensing and i'm looking into Teams phones to replace our current SIP solution.

 

Any advice or guides you could share please. Thanks

[Steve21]

“Don’t”

 

We looked at this previously and basically every part of the offering seems to work worse than a proper cloud PBX. Unless you’re really going down the level of getting rid of all phones and only using soft console etc

 

Steve

[jblackburnHWGA]

We're a serverless school. I'm looking at replacement phone services and i think the MS solution sounds like a good fit at our school. I'm looking for schools who use it and some help moving to it. Should we do it in house or get a third party involved?

We want to use physical phones in places but want to promote the soft console use with staff also.

[Steve21]

We're a serverless school. I'm looking at replacement phone services and i think the MS solution sounds like a good fit at our school. I'm looking for schools who use it and some help moving to it. Should we do it in house or get a third party involved?

We want to use physical phones in places but want to promote the soft console use with staff also.

 

That depends on how you’re planning to run it

 

You’re either going to pay MS call plans so there isn’t really any external involvement in it, or you link in external SIPs from a normal supplier (Gamma etc) and then run calls via then rather than with MS direct it just uses the Teams GUI in that sense

 

Most the setup work is more from your side in terms of what users have licenses, populating their phone numbers etc

 

Steve

[RobFuller]

Going to make the jump in July from a very old telephony system over to Teams using Direct Routing via a third party. Around 200 users and 60 handsets mixed estate.

Only porting numbers and basically starting again which isn't as bad as it sounds. It’s taken a bit of time to get my head around how we want it setup but thus far I'm happy with what we can achieve and the integration and automation it will offer linked into Salamander and existing Teams group we have setup already as we are deeply MS integrate.

Going to use a mixture of Poly SIP phones for common areas as we only need basic features there which means phone are dirt cheap and reliable. Only using full fat teams phones in exec offices. Be careful and check your full fat Teams phones will upgrade to Android 12 which for AudioCodes is this summer. This should match most existing Android Teams Room systems (we already use very happily) for further proofing. Elsewhere we are planning on using the Teams client (PC/Laptop dock) with the Yealink USB MP50 phone to give people the feel of a handset and buttons without the overhead, complexity of signing in regularly (hotdesking) and cost.

[jblackburnHWGA]

Thanks for the reply Rob. Good luck for July. Hope it goes smoothly.

We've got very few external numbers which is useful.

One thing i've not spotted, does teams phone let you have extensions numbers for internal communications?

[RobFuller]

Yes, but not with Teams Voice Plan which unless you are testing is too expensive! https://callroute.com/tech-blog/microsoft-teams/microsoft-teams-dial-by-extension/

[IT_JB]

One thing i've not spotted, does teams phone let you have extensions numbers for internal communications?

 

It's done with Dial Plans in Teams Admin, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/create-and-manage-dial-plans each handset/user has an external number so what you are doing is creating translation rules. For example 101 dials +44123456789 etc. You can then assign these dial plans to groups or users.

[jblackburnHWGA]

I've got A5. Do i just need a call plan if I want to make external calls

[IT_JB]

Call plan will give you a number and enable external calling but this is the most expensive licencing option.

 

We went with operator connect, which works out the same price as other hosted SIP solutions. Direct routing is also an option.

[MartinT]

We looked at Teams integration but it's pricy. As we have a new Mitel virtual phone system, we went with MiCollab softphone apps which work very well on a combination of classic deskphones and our Android and Apple mobile phones.

[RobFuller]

Going to make the jump in July from a very old telephony system over to Teams using Direct Routing via a third party. Around 200 users and 60 handsets mixed estate.

Only porting numbers and basically starting again which isn't as bad as it sounds. It’s taken a bit of time to get my head around how we want it setup but thus far I'm happy with what we can achieve and the integration and automation it will offer linked into Salamander and existing Teams group we have setup already as we are deeply MS integrate.

Going to use a mixture of Poly SIP phones for common areas as we only need basic features there which means phone are dirt cheap and reliable. Only using full fat teams phones in exec offices. Be careful and check your full fat Teams phones will upgrade to Android 12 which for AudioCodes is this summer. This should match most existing Android Teams Room systems (we already use very happily) for further proofing. Elsewhere we are planning on using the Teams client (PC/Laptop dock) with the Yealink USB MP50 phone to give people the feel of a handset and buttons without the overhead, complexity of signing in regularly (hotdesking) and cost.

 

Well the project got delayed slightly however running nearly two months now. Learned alot, a couple of teething issues but we are sorted now. The odd Yealink MP50 phone causing us trouble but to be honest trying to push those users to using Teams directly rather than relying on the handset. Final phone to roll out is an all weather analog phone for the pool side.

[Cw2k]

We went with the Jisc Teams SBC as it is licensed per concurrent call rather than per user.

Only physical phones now are classrooms using some £30 yealink Sip phones via the teams sip gateway, these are in common area mode so they can’t be accidentally signed out.

 

Users all have extensions handled by normalisation rules in dial plans.

 

Extensions configured in teams admin don’t work in auto attendants by default if you enable dial by extension, you have to add the extension to the users business phone in azure or phone number in ad if azure as synced.

[RobFuller]

Yes it's very annoying so many companies' charger per user when that just wasn't required!

[ITGuyNW]

We have 40 Yealink MP54s with Teams/Gamma. After a few months of updates, restarts, proxy configurations, fault finding, everything seems to have settled down now.

[supportman]

Teams phones are great, we moved about a year ago and it costs hardly anything through a call provider.

 

Most our users are just software with headsets now.

[snagrat]

Teams phones are great, we moved about a year ago and it costs hardly anything through a call provider.

 

Most our users are just software with headsets now.

 

Which call provider do you use and how much do you pay? Do you still pay per user?

[supportman]

Which call provider do you use and how much do you pay? Do you still pay per user?

 

Morning,

 

Just looked at our config and quote.

 

The provider is Voiceflex I believe for the teams direct routing service.

 

I don't think we pay per user for the routing service. It's £16 per month for each SIPP trunk out. Including 2000 minutes per user, per month to UK 01/02/03 and 5 main mobile networks.

 

The Microsoft licensing is £2.20 per user or shared phone. But we have some shared phones between department users, so the cost is again quite small.

[Max_Power]

Just wondered how its going @RobFuller and @supportman and whether you've any good or bad feedback of your experience? Looking into a new phone system at the moment, and to consolidate everything in Teams seems like a good idea (on paper at least).

[Boredguy]

@Max_Power We've moved 5 of our 7 schools over to teams (last 2 will get done in the new year), and my site has been running it for the past year or so now.

 

Was a bit of a learning curve for staff to get used to since we only put in handsets in "communal areas", or rooms where having a computer wasn't ideal (such as sick room), and everyone else uses headsets with the Teams App.

It's certainly allows us greater flexibility for setting up call queues and auto attendants compared to our legacy PBX system, and the fact voice mails get e-mailed means no more having to go to specific handset to recall the absence line as anyone in the group can read it.

[supportman]

Just wondered how its going @RobFuller and @supportman and whether you've any good or bad feedback of your experience? Looking into a new phone system at the moment, and to consolidate everything in Teams seems like a good idea (on paper at least).

 

Yes its been fantastic. Incredibly cheap and modern phone system integrated into teams.

 

Has saved us over 5k a year.

 

What's not to like really!!

[RobFuller]

Overall Teams Telephony has been going very well. People have adapted very quickly, and the integration is just seamless if you are already a heavy MS 365/Teams organisation.

 

We’ve had a little bit of issue with some Yealink USB handsets which I would love to get rid of TBH, there just a little buggy picking up that a user has signed in and sometimes require the device rebooting or unplug / re-plug in the USB. Seems like buggy driver to me. These are more for people clinging on to legacy phone usage and not wanting to use headset/ear buds that type of thing. We also use a mixed of Polly SIP phones for low use common areas as these are very solid, also got a Poly ATA to connect the Pool phone (phone in a yellow box, looks like an old AA type thing for emergencies etc). We also have some AudioCodes full fat team phones for senior staff which again have been good. Look very smart, they love the calendar integration reminding them of their next meeting. These should be receiving the latest Android update to bring them in line with our Logitech Team Meeting room bars.

 

We ended up with 250 public numbers as up until recently every user needed to be assigned a DDI (this has now changed!!) To make this as easy as possible to manage we loaded all that information into our MIS, Arbor using user defined fields and then Salamander automates the provisioning there on so that works great! Mans IT don’t need to be involved getting people telephony setup. Going forward this isn't a requirement to dial out anymore so we’ll likely fade out assigning DDI's unless the user wants one which for us is only a small number of people as most can be reaching via a call automation or reception for school this is more preferable than maybe in other sectors.

 

Happy to answer any more questions, Rob.

 

Edited: Formatting.

[supportman]

We ended up with 250 public numbers as up until recently every user needed to be assigned a DDI (this has now changed!!)

 

Oh wow! We have 22 DDI's and I thought that was too many haha.

 

Trying to get them back to using the shared phones but the convince of having a DDI integrated into their personal teams is too much for some of them

[RobFuller]

Oh wow! We have 22 DDI's and I thought that was too many haha.

 

Trying to get them back to using the shared phones but the convince of having a DDI integrated into their personal teams is too much for some of them

 

You certainly don't need to set it up like we have now which is a great improvement.

 

https://easy365.io/microsoft-teams-shared-calling-faq-6b3a6be69bcd

[ITGuyNW]

Can someone clear something up for me please?

 

Previous NM got our Teams phone system through a company called Charterhouse and they use Gamma for the phone numbers. We now need an additional 3 licences/numbers. After a while, they have finally given us 3 extra microsoft licences but I still need 3 new phone numbers so they can ring external. Charterhouse are being less than useless helping me with this.

 

Is this something I can approach Gamma directly to do? or do something in Teams admin? or is it down to the original supplier, Charterhouse, to do for me?