MS-700 Managing Microsoft Teams – Manage Phone System Part 2

5. Understanding Call Park and Calling Policies

First off, let’s start with call park. What exactly is call park? Well, call park is also sometimes referred to as call park and retrieve. This is going to let someone place a call on hold. And then what happens is when you place a call on hold, the service is going to generate a code, a unique code for what’s called call retrieval. Then the person who put the call on hold can retrieve that call anytime they want or they can specify the code to someone else. Somebody else can enter in that code and retrieve that call. I’ve got some examples here at the bottom of the slide for you to take a look at here. So here’s three examples. You have a receptionist who parks a call for someone working in a factory. Receptionist then announces the call and the code number over the speaker, the public address system.

The user who the call is for can pick up a team’s phone on the factory floor and enter the code, retrieve the call. Here’s another example. A user parks a call on a mobile device because the battery is getting low, right? So the user can then enter the code to retrieve the call from teams, from a team’s desk phone. And then lastly, you have a support representative, parks a customer call and sends an announcement on a team’s channel for an expert to retrieve the call and help the customer. Expert enters the code, retrieves the call, so you hopefully you get the idea there. All right? But that is what call parking is. Now there are some requirements for this. First off, to do call parking, user must have the enterprise voice.

There must be an enterprise voice user, and the administrator must grant the user a call park policy. So you can set a policy that’s going to allow your users to do call parking. Okay? So in other words, not everybody gets to do call parking. You have to set a policy for that. All right. And then another thing is below here we’ve got the supported clients and devices that we can support. So you can see the team’s desktop teams, Mac app, web app teams, mobile iOS app teams, IP phone, Skype for business phone, basically everything except for the Skype for business IP phones are going to support this. Now, okay, and not too much here if you’re taking the exam, not too much here to know, but I would know that the Skype for business IP phones are not supported for it.

All right? So important to know there, okay? And then lastly here I want to talk a little bit about what call policies are calling policies. So calling policies are going to help you control which calling and call forwarding features your users can use. Basically this is going to help determine whether a user can make private calls, use forwarding or maybe even simultaneous ringing so that other users can hear that the phone is ringing. Or maybe you want an external phone, maybe route calls. A user might want to route a call somewhere else or send it to a call center or call group. And then another thing a user can do is they can even support or another thing you can do with this is to support delegation for inbound and outbound calls if you want. This is going to be configured through your policy as well. Now there is going to be an. org wide policy which is the default policy, but you can also create a custom call policy and assign that to specific users if you want. So all in all, you’re going to find the system to be pretty intuitive, pretty easy. You’re going to do most of it through the Teams Admin Center. And although there’s some PowerShell stuff available, the Teams Admin Center is a pretty intuitive system, easy to set up, and Microsoft even recommends for the most part, unless you’re doing a cookie cutter scenario where you need to write. A site script that’s going to manage this across the board for a bunch of systems. Use the teams. Admin center is going to be the easiest way to go about it.

6. Managing Call Park Policies

Let’s take a look now at our call parking policies in teams. So we’re going to start out here in Portal, Microsoft. com. All right, we’re going to go over to the left and click Teams. Again if that does not show up, just to show. All right, so here we are in the Teams admin center. We’re going to drop down where it says Voice and scroll down a little bit. You’ll see call park policies so pretty simplistic by default. You just have a global wide policy here that you can configure and you can specify a description for it, but obviously it won’t let you change the name. You can allow call parking and then you’ll see the different options that you’ve got here. Call pickup, start of range, call pick up, end of range, part time out.

You got the proper licensing for this, you can modify all of that and set that to what you want. So that’s going to be when somebody calls and they park a phone call, they will assign it, they’ll get the unique ID and at that point they can retrieve that if they want. And then you’ve got a part time out of 300 seconds, as you can see. But all in all, not too much here. You have to configure if you want to. You can actually add a policy, give it a name and then assign it to whoever you want. All right? To users. You can also do group policy assignment here as well at a group if you want to do that. Okay, but pretty straightforward. Again, not too many configurations you have to worry about here as far as call part policies go.

7. Managing Calling Policies

I want to go through and talk now about calling policies. So here we are on the Teams Admin center underneath the Voice drop down. If you click down here where it says Calling policies, you’ll see this and you have three main default policies here. You have a global wide policy which you can go in and you can configure. You’ve got allow calling which is if you assign this to people it’s going to basically allow all, all of these things except for these two options. I’m going to go over what these are here in just a second and then you have disallow which is going to basically not allow calls to come in. The only feature that is on is this bottom one here and we’ll take a look at that here as well. So if I want to edit the existing one or I want to create a new one, I can. I’m going to call this a test calling policy here. First off, you can allow users to make private calls in your organization.

By turning this on, you can allow call forwarding and simultaneous ringing to people in your organization. So group where it rings a whole group of people, you can have that turned on. Remember, if you’re turning this off, these features are not going to be available to your users if they try to use them. Essentially is where they’re going with this call forwarding and simultaneous ringing to external phone numbers. You’d have that turned on. You can allow voicemail is available for routing inbound calls. Now by default that’s set to user control. So the user gets to set that. But you could enable it or disable it if you want. Then you have inbound calls can be routed to a call group. You got that turned on. So a group of people phone calls coming in can go to a group of people, allow delegation for inbound and outbound calls.

This allows somebody to delegate who the calls are going to go to prevent toll bypass and send calls through the PSTN. Now that’s turned off because that’s going to cost the company money. Essentially, if somebody’s making a phone call and there’s basically long distance charges or whatever, it usually goes through the Voiceover IP network and great, you don’t get charged any money, but maybe the network’s got some problems and a user wants to use the public switch telephone network, they could turn that feature on and they could use it. Of course, right now it’s turned off. So if I wanted to allow that, I could turn that on. Busy on busy is available when a call so what this is, is somebody calls in and they’re already on the phone with somebody else, they’re in a meeting or something like that, then they can get a busy signal.

Okay? So you can turn that on or off if you want and then allow web PSTN callings is going to allow them to call the public, switch telephone networks over the web essentially. So you can turn that feature on and off by flipping this little switch here. All right, so I can save that. And I’ve now created myself one of these little policies. I could select the policy and select Manage Users and specify who I want to assign this to. All in all, hopefully you’ll see that setting the calling policies though isn’t really too complex. Pretty straightforward settings. Now, I would like to also mention that you can control some of this through PowerShell. They’ve actually added a newer PowerShell command. If you go out and just open up a search engine like Google and search this command here, set CS Teams Calling policy.

Okay, you can go to this little article right here and it is a commandment that will let you do this. So if you go through this, take a look at it, you can look at your parameters and again, my favorite part is I can look at the examples they’ve got. I can look at all the different parameters and what they do. Essentially the parameters are going to tie to the things that we just talked about. But again, you can manage this using PowerShell. If you don’t want to use the Admin Center, microsoft still kind of recommends, hey, the Teams Admin Center is easy to use. You’re setting this is usually up for in a larger environment. So use the Team’s Admin center. Unless you are doing a cookie cutter. You’ve got to set this up in the same way for a bunch of different places, then maybe the PowerShell command is going to be a better route for you to go.

8. Managing Caller ID Policies

Let’s talk now about Caller ID policies. Okay, so with Caller ID policies, they tell you here that they’re going to be used to either change some of the Caller ID supported settings or just completely block it altogether. Okay? And they tell you that by default, a user’s phone number is going to be displayed when a call is made to a PSTN phone number, if you’re calling a landline or a mobile number. And there is a default global policy that you can edit here. So I can click on this and I can set this to what I want. I can’t change the name of the global, but I can set a description for it. Okay? And I can say block incoming Caller ID, just completely don’t support it. If I want, I can allow a user to override that if I set it. So if I blocked it, I could allow a user to override it by turning that on.

I could replace the Caller ID with the user’s number. I could have a service number or anonymous. If you choose service number, then you’ll have replaced the Caller ID with service number. This little option here will become available. You can also go and create a custom one of these as well. But I’m going to show you there’s something kind of funky about this, at least at the creation of this video. So you can turn this on, set this what you want, create your policy. But unlike the other areas of teams, you’re going to notice there’s no Manage users button here. This is sort of a big complaint right now with people, the community of teams. Microsoft is supposedly going to add that button. In fact, they’ve got articles out there saying the button is available, but it’s not.

So if you’re noticing in your tenant it’s there, then they finally added it. But if it’s not there, like in mind, it hasn’t been added yet. Now I got good news for you. There is a way to do this regardless. You can actually use a PowerShell command if you go out there to Google and you search for Grant CS calling Land Identity. All right, search that. Here it is right here, this little PowerShell command. You can do it through this PowerShell command, okay? So that’s a way to do it. Here’s an example of using the PowerShell command so you can apply that and at that point your policy will be applied. All in all though, you’ll hopefully find the Caller ID stuff is pretty straightforward to configure and set up in teams with the exception that one little button missing.

9. The Direct Routing Health Dashboard

I want to take a look now at the direct routing health dashboard in teams. So we’re going to start from the beginning. We’re on Portal Microsoft. com, so we’re going to go to the Teams Admin Center by clicking teams again. If it doesn’t show up, just click Show All. And here we are. We’re going to drop down where it says Voice and you’re going to see right here where it says Direct Routing. Okay? So this little dashboard here is going to help you you with looking at the SBC, the session border controller for your Microsoft phone system, and give you some idea of maybe why there’s been dropped calls, what the average call duration is, all of that good stuff. Now unfortunately, I don’t have a lot going on because I don’t have an enterprise voice system. I can show you here again, with the consulting work and stuff I do, I can exactly connect into their stuff and show it to you.

However, I got some good news for you. Microsoft has a great example that you can look at of this health dashboard. If you go out to a search engine like Google and just search these keywords right here, health Dashboard for direct routing. If you search that, they’ve got an article right here that’s going to help you look at interpret this dashboard. So if we click on this article, and I encourage you to do that, here’s a great picture of one of these in use, okay, that you can take a look at. I’m just going to right click that. I’m going to say Open image in New tab. And here it is. Okay. So you can look there. You’ve got a little breakdown of your connections here. It mentions the SBC. You’ve got the network effective calls effectiveness calls.

All right, it’s telling you here the average call duration, the TLS connection status, that’s transport layer security sip, that’s session initiated protocol options, whether that’s active, if they’ve got any inactive messages, concurrent calls, what the capacities is. Capacity is not set yet, so it’s within the limits that they’ve configured if they’ve set. So if you go back over here too, they sort of break this down. They give you the summary which shows the total number of your SBC registered systems in there. And you’ve got what the fully qualified domain name is of each of those. That’s what you’re seeing here, right? These little names and the average call duration, okay? And they tell you this is an average call, one to one for your public switch telephone network.

The TLS connectivity status is going to show the status of how many TLS connections you got, what the health is of that. And they do tell you that when you get into TLS, remember that TLS is a digital certificate technology, so it’s encrypting everything, right? And if there’s a problem with, say, the digital certificate, say the expiration date is about to expire within 30 days. That’s when you’re going to start getting warnings. Then you got Sip options, session initiation protocol, that’s here and that’s also what you’re looking at right up here when they mentioned Sip, right? Okay, so this is going to tell you, it basically is sending a SPC every minute and it’s checking the health status of that.

Like, what is the health status of your sip? Session initiation protocol is a protocol that is establishing voiceover IP based connections. So it’s testing that every minute and letting you know if it’s got good connectivity or not. Okay? Then they also give you some more information with detailed options. So active warning, they tell you if it’s active. It says direct routing service sees options flowing. So if your public switch telephone network is flowing out through direct routing into Microsoft’s system, then it’s telling you if it’s active or if there’s any particular warnings. Okay? They also tell you that, they tell you with the session border controller if it exists, your administrator created it using this command. This is the new CS online PS ten gateway when established.

Now if you walk through that process, and I did mention this earlier, if you walk through that process of doing the gateway, the PSTN gateway for routing, for direct routing, then you would have ran that command in order to do it because they did not create a graphical way as of yet to do that. But anyway, warning messages, if they’re getting any kind of errors or getting any kind of warnings, that’s the kind of stuff that’s going to pop up there. And then lastly, you have concurrent call capacity and this is going to show you what the limit of concurrent calls is with your SBC, okay? And there’s also some more PowerShell commands there that can give you some information on that.

And they do mention those. Again, let me just kind of warn you from an exam perspective, you’re taking the exam, you definitely need to know that this report exists. You need to know what the purpose of it is for direct routing, health dashboard and all that, and have an idea of just what these different columns are. This is not something that’s heavily tested. You don’t have to be an expert on this. They do realize guys, that not everybody who’s taking the exam has access to an enterprisebased phone system. So you’ll notice that there’s not a whole lot there. They’re going to beat you to death on the test in regards to teams with the phone system, but they do expect you to understand just some of the general terminology and all that is involved here.