1. PSTN Connectivity Solutions
Telephone network. And this is all about you hooking into phone systems and being able to make phone calls regarding teams and all that fun stuff. Now, Microsoft has what it calls the Microsoft Phone System. Okay? So the Microsoft Phone System is a cloud-based phone system that Microsoft can allow you to assign phone numbers to and that you can use as a voice-over-IP solution. So traditionally, we have what’s known as a “PBX,” a private branch exchange. And this is something that your business would hook up in order to get their phone system working with extensions and voicemail and all that good stuff. And normally your company would set that up, and they would go through a provider. Well, what Microsoft is saying here is, “Hey, we can be your provider.” You can actually use a cloud-based system to manage your phone numbers, voicemail call routing, and all of that good stuff.
All right? So this is actually a license-based system that can be licenced through your Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscriptions. And it is something that they are offering that will allow you to go full-blown into a cloud-based PBX. Or if you wanted more of a hybrid solution—where you’ve got your on-premises equipment working with it and you’re still going to use your own provider—but you want to assign phone numbers and all that to your people, you can. OK, so essentially, if you’re going to connect to the PSTN, there are two different ways of doing this. First off, you can purchase a Microsoft calling plan, alright? And they have both a domestic as well as a domestic international licence that you can go with. All right? Again, this is part of an add-on subscription. I’ll show you here in just a second where that is. But it’s basically a Microsoft calling plan.
You’ll be using Microsoft as your cloud-based PSTN solution. Or, as I was just mentioning, you can go with more of a hybrid scenario. You can have your own telephony infrastructure, your own PSTN provider, and essentially, with that, you can tie phone numbers together and do all that using teams. And this is called direct routing. So we’ll take a deeper look at direct routing here, which is coming up as well. Let me jump in now real quick, and we’ll take a look at where your add-on licence is going to be done through the Microsoft 365 portal. Looking real quick here on the portal Microsoft.com, we’lltake a look at getting a licence for this.So if we look over here to the left, we can drop down where it says Billing, and then we’ll click on Purchase Services. All right? And then from there, if you don’t already have an Office 365 licence for your company, what you would do is select one and assign it. For example, I can click “details.” You can also do a free trial if you want.
And if you set that up, they will not charge your credit card without your permission. Don’t worry, if you’re doing a free trial, they may ask you to put in your credit card, but they will not build that card without your confirmation that it is okay. So you can feel confident that you’re not going to get hit with any money without knowing. But anyway, if we go here and click on Add-ons, you’ll see right here: Microsoft 365 Domestic Calling Plan Trial. So, that’s where I’m going to put it. Another thing I’d like to point out is the additional cost here. So if you actually go out to your search engine and you type “Microsoft Calling Plan,” all right, to search that, there’s a document right here you can click on that will give you some information on the calling plan. But what I want to look at right now is phone system calling plans’ direct routing. If we click on that, it’s going to take you directly to their site, where you can click on “See Plans and Pricing,” which gives you some details on costs. Of course, this was the price in the United States at the time this video was made. But you might want to just kind of check andmake sure you understand what the pricing of all thisis going to be for your company, your organization.
Of course, you should think twice before diving in head first, and if you’re just fooling around and doing this as a test, that’s fine. However, make certain that you are aware of the pricing. Okay? So that’s my advice on that, and we’ll continue on here. So jumping back in here, just talk a little bit more about the calling plans. Again, there are two calling plans. You have a domestic and international calling plan. So essentially these two calling plans, whichever one you go with, is going to be assigned to your users based on their usage location.
So you may recall that when you create a user or work with user identities in the Microsoft 365 world, you have to assign a usage location in order to assign any kind of license. And of course, licences are no exception to that rule. So basically, the domestic calling plan is going to be licenced to your users located in whatever country or region their usage location is assigned to, and the same is true for your domestic international calling plan, okay? The same type of deal is available based on their usage location. As a result, the fees will vary depending on the usage location. Another interesting aspect of the Microsoft phone system and services is that they provide some pretty cool little features that you would expect from a standard PBX-based system. You have automatic attendance, and this is going to help you build a menuing system. So people are calling in, and they’re going to be able to be transferred to the proper person they need to talk to. You’ve also called queues, correct? So this will essentially be greetings associated with your organization’s phone number. And you can basically have phone calls that canbe put on hold, you can have music playing,you know, the standard stuff that you would expectout of a normal PBX system essentially.
Finally, you receive voicemail. So your users can create a voicemail, and users can call in and leave voicemails, just like what you would normally do. Again, in a typical public production-based PBX environment, your cloud service handles only this. Okay? So the other thing we have, and the last thing I want to discuss here, is direct routing. So direct routing, again, is in a scenario where perhaps you have decided that, you know what, we’ve got a PSTN provider in our organization, and we’re going to use our own PSM provider as opposed to going full-blown with Microsoft’s cloud system, all right, phone system. So if you’re going to do that, then what will happen is a direct routing. It’s going to let you connect your SPC, which is the session border controller, to the Microsoft phone system, all right? So basically, what will happen with direct routing? It’s going to allow the PST and trunk to work with the Microsoft Phone system and basically interact between the two, interoperating between the two using your own telephony equipment, or, if you like to say it this way, telephony equipment. All right. But it will allow third-party PBX systems and analogue devices and all that to work in conjunction with that Microsoft Phone system here.
So as you can see in the little diagram here, you’ve got your PSTN provider, there are telephone trunks going into your organization, you have your session border controller, and you’ve got a third party. This is all going to work just like it normally would with a normal hardware-based PBX solution. And then from there, it looks into the cloud-based PBX system, which your team users can use for phone numbers. Now again, this isn’t something other than knowing what direct routing is. If you’re taking the team’s exam, this is really a big part of the exam because there are so many different providers and they have so many different configurations here that there’s not really too much they can really hit you with on this. But I would recommend that you know what direct routing is. The concept is “direct routing,” and then it’s basically going to hook into your session border controller.
Okay, let me show you a couple of other things as we kind of finish up this little lesson up.Let me show you a couple of other quick things in regards to direct routing. So if you are going to use direct routing, Microsoft has a great document that you can sort of step through with your company and follow. Now again, I don’t know exactly what phone systems you guys are using out there. There are so many different things. So it’s important that you go through their recommended checklist on how to set this up in your environment. Again, this is not really a testable topic at all other than just knowing what direct routing is and if a company should use it based on their PSTN. But if you are doing this in the real world, you need to check this list out and go step by step through what Microsoft is telling you to do. So how can I find that article?
Simply enter these keywords into a search engine like Google. Microsoft phone system direct routing, and this article phone system, direct routing. So if you click on that, they’ve got it right here for you, and basically you’re just going to go down this list here, and that’s going to help you with setting this up and configuring it. Okay? So again, there’s only so much here I can show you because the phone systems are different. You have to have access to an actual phone system if you’re going to use direct routing, a PSTN-based system in your own environment that you want to utilise with teams. But this article right here is what Microsoft is going to point you to. When you call their customer service, this is what they will say. You need to go through this list and configure everything so that you have all of the supported border controllers and everything else, and then you’ll be able to get this configured.
2. Phone Numbers
As far as getting phone numbers for your users, there are essentially three main options that are available to you. First, you can use the Microsoft Teams Admin Center, which I’m going to show you in this next little video. But for most countries and regions of the world, you should be able to use this admin centre to put your information in, get phone numbers for your users, and assign those phone numbers. It’s really simple and really easy to use.
Another option is to port your existing numbers. So again, if you have an existing phone carrier and you’re moving over to the Microsoft phone system, then you can port those phone numbers from your current service provider over to the phone carrier. And then finally, if one of these first two options doesn’t meet your needs, the third option is kind of where you end up having to go. And this is essentially based on the fact that some countries and regions are not supported by the Admin Center. And so what you have to do is fill out what is called a request form. And there is the request form located on Microsoft’s website, where you can go and put in the information. You can fill out and submit this form. At that point, you can get the phone numbers you need. Now the other question is, “How many numbers can I get?” Right? So the numbers you can get have a little formula, and if you are going to be taking the exam, you are going to want to know this little formula. All right? So I highly recommend memorizing this little formula. It sounds complicated at first, but it’s really not. But, in essence, the number of numbers you’ll receive is determined by the number of licenses you have for your users.
Whether you’ve got the domestic calling plan or the domestic international calling plan It’s going to be based on the number of licenses you have. And then you’re going to multiply that number by 1.1 and add ten to it. and that’s going to be your answer. Okay, here’s an example: Let’s say you have 50 users total licensed, OK? And so if you have a 50-user license, the math for that would be 50 times 1.1 plus ten. And if you do the math, you will get 65 numbers. Okay? So it’s really not as complex as it sounds, but you do need to know that there’s not really a lot of exam content that you need to worry about with the phone system and phone numbers. But this is one thing I would know before the exam—their little formula. Okay? So the number of licenses you have, are purchasing, or whatever, multiply that by 1.1 and add ten to it. That’s simple. All right? Okay, now for the last little bit here in regards to phone numbers, where we look at the Admin Center when you port phone numbers, if you need 999 or fewer numbers, then you can simply just use the porting wizard that’s located in the team’s Admin Center.
Okay? If there’s a problem with your region or country information—maybe it’s not available there—then you’ll have to follow. You have to go to the website. On the website, there’s a managed phone number for your organisation that you can go to, and you can download a letter of authorization that you have to fill out and submit to Microsoft. Now, if you have more than 999 phone numbers that you need to transfer, you’ll have to manually go through the submission process. You’ll have to get the letter of authorization and send that in. Okay? Basically, it will go through the PSTN service desk, and that way you can get all of your numbers transferred. Microsoft does have that information located on its website. The specifics, as well as the procedure, If you were taking the team’s exam, the only thing I would know is that if your score was less than 999, you could use the Admin Center. If it’s more than usually, you can use the AdminCenter, based on your country or region. If it’s more than $999, well, you’ve got to fill out the letter of authorization. Okay? All right. So hopefully it gives you a nice little understanding of just the facts about phone numbers involving the microphone system.
3. Phone Numbers in the Teams Admin Center
Let’s jump in now and take a look at how the phone numbers are going to be managed through the Teams admin center. So here we are on portal dot Microsoft.com. We’ll go to the Teams Admin Center, which is on the left here. Again, if it doesn’t show up, click “Show All” and you’ll see it. So we’re going to click “Teams” here. This is going to pull you into the Teams Admin Center; enter. The next thing we’re going to do is go down here to this little voice drop down.
We’re going to drop that and click on phone numbers. Okay. So this is where you’ll enter your phone numbers, the phone numbers that you’ll be using. All you’ve got to do is click “Add Here,” and then at that point, you’re going to locate your region. All right, United States, put in the phone number type. Now, when it comes to phone numbers, there are various types. You have the user, which is just a subscriber. This is sort of what we’re focusing on here. They tell you these are used by your users. You’ve also got a dedicated conference bridge. We talked about bridge settings before, bridges before. These are going to be little service numbers that will be used in your conference bridges. Your dedicated conference bridge is toll-free. So there is toll and toll free. Okay, these are going to be numbers that you can use for your conference bridge. You will be able to obtain toll-free numbers. You’ve joined the line.
So these are for what’s called “call queues.” We haven’t talked much about it yet, both for toll and free, and then for the auto attendant. Okay. Also, I haven’t really spent a lot of time talking about auto attendant yet, but these are the service numbers that will be assigned for auto attendant. This is for toll and toll-free numbers. But again, right now, what we’re focused on is the user, which is the subscriber. So we’re going to click on that. Then you would put in a location. If you don’t have a location, you just click on “Add a location,” and then you can put in, again, country, region, whatever. And then you could put in your company’s address right here. So you’re going to put that address in and give it a name. At that point, you can specify the number of numbers you want to receive. At that point, you would click “next” and you could get your numbers. Okay. And that’s how you’re actually going to get your numbers. that can then be assigned to your users.
4. Emergency Addresses and Dynamic Emergency Calling
So first off, understand some of the terminology that you’ll see here. Microsoft uses the term “emergency address.” Emergency address. They tell you this is a civic address, basically a street address for some kind of business or organisation as a whole.
And then, when you set up that address, you can actually go to what are called places. Now a place is going to indicate, say, a building, or maybe a location in that building, like a floor or certain wing or office number, suite number, or something along those lines. It’s going to kind of describe where that is so that somebody who has an emergency can have their phone number assigned to one of those places. And emergency personnel call, say, 911 or something like that. Like we have here in the United States, a person knows where to go, and the dispatcher knows where to go. So then you’ve also got what’s called an emergency location. This is also a civic address. They tell you where; they tell you this is going to have an optional place if you want, and this is going to be used in a situation where your business has more than one physical location. Okay? Now they do tell you that when you go through the process of creating an emergency address, you’re going to have a unique location ID number that’s going to be assigned to a unique location ID that’s going to be assigned to that address. And when you add a place to it, it basically uses a combination of the two, all right? So it’ll have a place and an ID that goes with it. And then the last thing you’ll see here is that you have what’s called a registered address.
So the registered address is going to be an emergency address that’s essentially going to be assigned to whatever the calling plan in general is that you have, whatever your calling plan is. When you sign up for the calling plan, you have to have an emergency address that’s going to be associated with it, and that ends up being the default if you don’t go through the process of configuring the proper emergency location information. Okay, one other quick thing. We talked about direct routing users. They tell you here that registered addresses do not apply to direct routing users. OK, so something else is here; you have emergency address validation. So when you set up an emergency address, it’s going to try to validate the emergency address. It’s going to try to pinpoint where it is. It won’t just let you put any address in the world in there. It will attempt to discover that Microsoft recommends that you do not attempt to bypass or skip through that in any way. You must have it pinpoint the exact address that it will use. All right? They do tell you that if you can’t validate an address, then you have to create essentially a new address, and you’ll have to use basically an updated address that’s near where your address is at.
So if you’re having trouble finding it, that’s definitely a problem. All right? Ideally, Microsoft wants you to use their map feature, which you’ll see in the next short video I show you. I’ll show you that little map feature. They want you to use that map feature to validate exactly where you are, okay? And that’s what they advise you to use when determining your emergency address validation. Now you’ve also got emergency address geocodes too.So this is where you get into longitude and latitude. This is another reason why it’s important to use their map feature because it’s going to provide the longitude and latitude, okay? This is also going to assist in what’s called “dynamic locations.” in case people are moving around to different places. A user might move their phone number to a different building or something. It can dynamically update that information and know where they are based on that geocode.
Okay? You can use the team’s Admin Center to control some of this, but you also have the ability to use PowerShell to manage this. Although you may believe it or not, this is one of those few cases where Microsoft says the graphic is recommended for managing this. though you can use PowerShell to do it as well. It’s a little bit more complicated, obviously. All right, so you’ve got emergency call capability. So how do you turn it on? Okay, so first off, you’ve got your calling plan. So once you’ve got your calling plan configured and licenced to your users, it’s an automatic thing. The emergency call enablement is already set up, but it goes by some global settings, which you’re going to see in this next little video where I show you the global policy settings on that. Okay? But basically, the location is going to be associated with the telephone number based on your country or region. And then, of course, here in the United States and Canada, they have emergency locations, which are going to be required when a number is assigned to a user.
So users in the United States and Canada must enter that when they are licensed. You have other countries; they tell you Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; they tell you the emergency location. Also, when you get a phone number from Microsoft 365 or Office 365, if it’s being transferred from another service right now as far as dynamic emergency calling goes, So with dynamic emergency calling, this is great because it will route the emergency calls based on the current locations of a certain team member or client, and it will happen automatically to the appropriate public safety answering point, or PSAP, as they call it. Okay? Or, basically, to notifying security desk personnel as well. So basically, we’re going with that. Someone calls emergency services; it can be configured so that they’re called, let’s say, 9-1-1 in the United States, but it will also go to a security desk person or a group of people who can listen in on the call. They get a notification. You’re also going to see that in the next little video that I show you. I’m going to show you where that’s configured and the different settings on that. Okay? The calling plan itself for dynamic location is essentially going to be routed in different situations here in the United States based on what they show you here.
If you’re in a different country and dealing with all of this, you would need to look up your routing information on this.I’ve got the United States’ information up here, but along the same lines, for most countries, it’s going to be along the same lines, but you need to look it up for the country or region you’re in. Now, from a test standpoint, if you’re taking the team’s exam, I wouldn’t stress about knowing the specifics of the various countries’ information and all that. All right. But essentially, based on the United States, they tell you that the team’s client for the United States calling this will automatically acquire your emergency address based on where you are and will be automatically routed to the proper PSAP, the public safety answering point. Okay? Now they also tell you that if your team’s client calling plan doesn’t support dynamic acquisition of emergency addresses, then it will end up going to the registered address that is registered to their plans. So it is important that stuff is properly set up and configured. A user can log on and configure their information, or admins can configure their information.
And if you don’t, then it just goes back to the default of whatever the plan is. Okay? So it’s definitely something you’ve got to think about in regards to configuring this. And then finally, as far as emergency call routing goes, when somebody in a team has a calling plan and they dial an emergency number, the call is going to be routed to the proper PSA, and it’s going to be based on some of the following things you see here: One is whether the emergency address is dynamically determined by the team’s client, whether the emergency address is a registered address and associated with the user’s phone number, and the emergency calling network of the country that they’re in. Then there are some commons breakdowns with some of the common countries we have. So in the United States, if the team’s client is located in a dynamic emergency location, it’s going to follow that. If they aren’t, it will either go to the client’s emergency calls or be screened by the National Call Center, and it will go based on that, based on their geographic location.
So, for example, if I call 911, it’s going to look at the physical location and send emergency personnel to that area. If an emergency caller is unable to update their emergency location with the screening center, the call will be transferred to the PSA serving the caller’s registered address, which is the last option. So wherever that registered address is, that’s where they’re calling from. And then you can see some of the other details here. Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom They tell you emergency calls will be screened, their location determined, and then connected to the appropriate dispatch center. For France, Germany, and Spain, emergency calls are routed directly to the PSA serving the emergency address associated with a phone number, regardless of the location of the caller.
In the Netherlands, emergency calls are routed directly to the PSA for the local area code of the number, regardless of the location of the caller. In Australia, emergency addresses are configured and routed by the carrier partner. And finally, in Japan, emergency calling is not supported. My advice to you is that, if you’re in different countries and you’re setting this up for a company, you need to look up your country and region information. Microsoft’s knowledge base contains a large number of documents. No joke. If you go out there to Google and you search “emergency call routing for teams” and put your country in there, you’re going to find some information there. Okay? Alright, so that gives you a breakdown of the emergency information in regards to the PSTN side of things with teams. Let’s jump in now and look at where we can figure out some of that in this next little video.
5. Emergency Addresses in the Teams Admin Center
Okay, let’s take a look at some of this emergency stuff here in the Teams admin center. So we’re going to start out on portal dot Microsoft.com.
We’re going to look to the left. We’ll go to the Teams admin centre from here. As always, you can click “Show All.” if it does not show up, OK? So from there, we’re going to drop right down here where it says Locations, and we’re going to go to emergency addresses, all right? So from here, we can add emergency addresses. We’ll just click “Add,” then specify “Let’s go to the United States,” and we’ll need to add a location. So I’m going to add the Atlanta capital address for Atlanta, Georgia, all right? And we’ll act as if that’s where we are. So there it is. It’s good for it to pinpoint it because it can give you longitude and latitude, which are important. We’re just going to call this HQ Headquarters, all right?
We’ll hit Save, and now we’ve added it. So if we go here, we can click on HQ and click where it says Places, and we can specify things like “Building 101st floor,” for example, hit apply on that, and we’ve now got that as one of our places. You can also specify voice users if you’ve got voice users that have been assigned to that location. Of course, at this point, I don’t think you can also edit what’s going to be seen right here in these different columns. Okay, now the other thing that’s going to happen is that I need to jump over here to where it says “Voice,” and I’m going to drop that down. I’m going to go with emergency policies. here, and you have call policies. All right, this is going to apply to our dynamic emergency calling feature. We’re going to come down here, where it says “Global Wide Default.” We can create a new one or edit the existing one. Okay? So from there, we have notification mode.
And so if somebody calls emergency services, you can send notifications. So the people that are in this group are going to all get notification that somebody has called emergency services. You may hold a conference, but please keep it muted. So at that point, they’ll get a notification. They can also listen in on the call, after which you have conference in and are unmuted. They get a notification as well as the ability to listen in and communicate on this call. So you can select whichever of these you want, OK? Then there are the emergency phone numbers. So we can specify a number there that we want. When you look here, they say it’s as if you chose converse in but are muted or converse in but are unmuted. You can enter a PSTN phone number, a security group, or both in the notification mode.
Okay? It says that when you put a phone number in. It can be an E164 standard-format phone number or a series of numbers, depending on how your calls are being routed. So you can add that in there so that it calls that number. Okay. These call routing policies are something else we need to look at here. We click on that, and we need to specify what our emergency numbers are going to be with call routing. So, if we look down here, we can see that it says Global Organization. We can add an additional one. We can just edit the global setting again. So we’re just going to edit that. And I’ve just added 911. Okay. Now, I added that myself, but if you want to add it yourself, you just click here and put in 911. All right. This is just a string identifier, and this is the number it’s going to call. You add that. If you want to add more, simply hit save and you’re done.
You now have that added. Okay. All right. And so that is how you’re going to add the number for your emergency address. Now one other quick thing is you can also manage this through PowerShell, which is a relatively new feature, although Microsoft is still saying they haven’t added full support for it yet, so they still kind of recommend you do it through the Admin Center. But there is some PowerShell stuff here if you wanted to kind of script things; all you need to do is view their article on this. If you go to Google or your favourite search engine and search for “new campus sexual harassment policy,” you go there. There’s an article about this right here that you can look at, and it shows you how to use this command. So there are some examples of how exactly to use the command here. And this will let you go through and actually create a policy using PowerShell.
