My Demo 365: Teams Phone – Shared Calling – Shared Devices Edition

darylhunter

Hello! Welcome back! I wanted to cover off on a super top-of-mind topic this week. For the last couple of months, we’ve been listening and learning to understand how Shared Calling for Teams Phone has been landing and meeting customers’ needs. We went GA (Generally Available) a couple months ago with the Shared Calling policy creation and assignment via PowerShell only. At Ignite in November we announced the Teams Admin Center option for policy creation and assignment is coming shortly. I’m hearing from many customers about their excitement to light up creative “Teams Phone on Demand” scenarios.

That said, one of the most recent topics to come out of the Shared Calling scenarios is around Microsoft Teams Shared Devices – like Common Area Phones, Teams Displays, and even Microsoft Teams Rooms. Recently customers have been interested in lighting up PSTN Calling to these devices. Those customers may or may not be interested in a full Teams Phone implementation. I want to cover off on the simple topic of activating PSTN Calling to a Shared Device – in this case, a Common Area Phone and also a Teams Display – utilizing Shared Calling!

Homework First
To help accelerate our conversation, I’d like to draw your attention to my previous two posts which covered off on how to setup and activate both Shared Calling via PAYG Calling Plans and Shared Calling via Operator Connect. So, please start there and then come back here.

Shared Devices Starting State
Here is a good understanding of the “starting state” for our scenario. I’m going to use both a Common Area Phone and a Teams Display for this blog.

  • Common Area Phone – cap-reception@mydemo365.com – I have created a new resource account and deployed a Poly Trio C60 Teams Phone for this exercise using this resource account. I followed our Teams Devices Deployment Playbook (currently slide 30) for this top-to-bottom. The Teams Shared Devices license is assigned, the device is enrolled and currently online and active.

And the console of the Common Area Phone looks like this: Notice that there is a “dialpad” as expected in the Common Area Phone UI/UX, but, if you try to make a phone call, it will fail because we don’t have PSTN / Enterprise Voice enabled at the moment.

  • Teams Display – shared-display@mydemo365.com – I have created a new resource account and deployed a Neat Frame Display for this exercise using this resource account. I followed our Teams Devices Deployment Playbook (currently slide 32) for this top-to-bottom. The Teams Shared Devices license is assigned, the device is enrolled and currently online and active.

And the console of the Teams Display looks like this: Notice that there is a “Calls” button as expected in the Teams Display UI/UX, but, if you try to make a phone call, it will fail because we don’t have PSTN / Enterprise Voice enabled at the moment.

Enable Shared Calling
I’m not going to exhaust the top-to-bottom approach like I did in the previous two Shared Calling articles. Remember, I linked to those in the very top of this post in the “Homework First” section. If you want to see every step along the way to enable Shared Calling, please go read those. So for this, I’m going to simply show you enabling enterprise voice and also granting the shared calling policy for these accounts.

  • Common Area Phone – cap-reception@mydemo365.com – following the “Operator Connect” post from before, let’s properly enable the resource account for the Poly Trio C60 device:
  • Teams Display – shared-display@mydemo365.com – similarly, following the “Operator Connect” post from before, let’s properly enable the resource account for the Neat Frame device:

Make It Real DW!
Okay, like always, the proof is in the pudding as they say. Who are they? And why pudding? Any, I digress: Here is a simple outbound test from the Common Area Phone – cap-reception@mydemo365.com which is the Poly Trio C60. I’ll open the Calls App and dial my cell phone. It Rings.

And then I answer it of course.

Next outbound test – the Teams Display – shared-display@mydemo365.com which is the Neat Frame. I’ll open the Calls App and dial my cell phone. It rings.

And then I answer it – the call connects.

This is just like the OTHER Shared Calling Demos. But, worth a reprise so you can see it on the device UI/UX to make sure there are no tricks 🙂

Let’s hang up and wrap this up but first an important note: you *may* need to assign a CallerID Policy to make sure the outbound caller ID is properly reflected. AFAIK this is only a Direct Routing requirement. I haven’t had to do this for PAYG or Operator Connect powered Shared Calling scenarios.

Resources for further learning
Now that we’re at the end, I always try to highlight some useful resources for your continued learning.

Phone System documentation for Shared Calling

Plan for Shared Calling – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn 
Configure Shared Calling – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn 
Shared Calling scenario – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn 

TPM (Teams PowerShell Module) PS cmdlet documentation

New-CsTeamsSharedCallingRoutingPolicy 
Get-CsTeamsSharedCallingRoutingPolicy 
Remove-CsTeamsSharedCallingRoutingPolicy 
Set-CsTeamsSharedCallingRoutingPolicy 
Grant-CsTeamsSharedCallingRoutingPolicy 

YouTube – from Shervin Shaffie who is a Microsoft Principal Technical Specialist

Shervin Shaffie (Principal TS) Walkthrough

We made it. You did it. We’re done. I’d love to hear any comments about this and if you find this useful or if this doesn’t *yet* fit a scenario you have where you need to provide Teams Phone to Shared Devices without dedicated phone numbers. This looks compelling for most. Tell me what you think.