Microsoft initiated a webinar series by Microsoft communication leaders and HR to share insights and challenges regarding modern communication and cultural transformation. There are several webinars from May, 16 to June, 26, 2019. The contents are, for instance, communicating better, storytelling, empower employees, effective internal communication, employee feedback and optimized communication on employee feedback.
Microsoft released a very important update in case you are planning or already operating Microsoft Teams Direct Routing. I’m very excited about this recent service update. The Call Queue (CQ) and Auto Attendant (AA) Services for call flows and call automation were updated for Teams Direct Routing.
Let me recap and point out the capabilities which were announced via the Teams blog by Microsoft:
Please note, in case you utilize SFB Online CQ/AA capabilities already: There are some details for as-is CQ/AA which will be automatically migrated/transferred from the SFB Online Admin Center to the Teams Admin Center.
I’m really thrilled and excited about these updates. Why? Well, if you were still on Skype for Business Server with Enterprise Voice there were some limitations especially regarding SFB Response Groups which now seem to be addressed with this update for Teams Direct Routing.
What does this mean for you? If you have loads of SFB response groups, e.g. Sales hotline, Support hotline, department … hotlines or else you can start to plan to migrate those to Teams with Teams Direct Routing. I.e. you can assign your onpremise phone numbers for this which you use via Teams Direct Routing (an SBC) which will route incoming PSTN phone numbers from your PSTN link via qualified /certified Session Border Controller (SBC) to Microsoft Phone System and Teams.
Isn’t it amazing? I was waiting quite some time on these capabilities. Well, online you could find some workaround to get this working via SBC SIP message manipulation (no big deal), however these workarounds were not support by Microsoft, so if there would have been any minor change on the Cloud Backend it could break things. And I’m sure you don’t want to have a workaround solution for important or even business critical hotlines which might not work all of a sudden? But now, there are the required capabilities to plan for shifting onpremise SFB Response Groups to (Teams Direct Routing) without any workaround (SIP message manipulations, call forwarding…).
In this post I like to notify you about the upcoming support of Music On Hold (MoH) with Microsoft Teams. As of now MoH is planned to be released in June 2019. MoH will provide music to a caller as long as he/she is on hold by the callee, instead of silence.
MoH is a basic telephony feature in my opinion. If there is no music you might think that the line is dead and you hang up after waiting for a while.
Well, please note, if someone would just mute his/her mic and let you wait in the line there is no MoH.
In this post I want to notify about the release of the latest Audiocodes One Voice Operations Center (OVOC) version and briefly explain what OVOC is and where it might help you.
In OVOC 7.6.1116 some remarkable features were added to the product as well as some changes were made to overcome limitations of previous versions.
The One Voice Operations Center is a single pane of glass which helps you to manage voice endpoints and voice service in your voice infrastructure and network. It enables you via browser to globally manage voice devices, monitor your voice network service/s, support you to troubleshoot issues within your voice network (also with SFB) and it provides rich reporting to gain insights.
There are two versions available: Basic and Advanced. The basic version provides (only) device management.
In my opinion OVOC is a must if you deploy several (voice) devices across your enterprise to have the ability to centrally manage and monitor these devices and the voice service operation. The more components the more important and inevitable it becomes. Especially, if your responsibility is to ensure a good voice user experience you should definitely consider to deploy OVOC for your Audiocodes voice network if not done yet.
In this post I share some feature requests or ideas which I would like to see and have in Microsoft Teams. Maybe you would like to have one or the other features in Teams, too, so don’t hesitate to vote for that via the Microsoft Teams User Feedback Forum.
The above features are just ideas and wishes on what I would like to see and have in Microsoft Teams in the future. There might be workaround solutions to get things done but I would prefer a non-workaround solution which is streamlined with the Microsoft Teams user or admin experience. Please also vote for one or more of the above “wishes” if you also would like to have this in Microsoft Teams.
Please note that voting on the User Feedback Forum is of course just a suggestion and without any binding or obligations for any party.
In this post I point out where to start troubleshooting and where logs for a Microsoft Teams (windows) client are located by default. Where to start (client) troubleshooting? Well, this depends at which deployment state you are. If you are evaluating Teams in a PoC and all PoC Teams users are affected you might start to check your infrastructure and connectivity before digging deeper into client log analysis.
First of all you should verify and validate that your infrastructure and network connectivity towards Microsoft Cloud Edge is alright. To do this you can verify that all “Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges” are accessible via your network and internet breakout. Ensure that you have configured the required proxy exceptions and firewall rules allowing to connect to Microsoft Cloud services. Common misconfigurations are missing proxy exceptions, firewall rules, firewall (ssl) interception or deep packet inspection mechanisms. Also, an unbenifical and/or legacy network design can cause increased latency, roundtrip times (rtt), jitter, packet loss and lead to bad user experience. So, you should better make your infrastructure and especially your network ready for cloud communication and collaboration (see “Prepare your organization’s network for Microsoft Teams”).
Easy ways to check your network connectivity towards Microsoft Cloud Data Center edges is the “Skype for Business Network Assessment Tool”. It’s a powershell-based tool and helps you to get a snapshot on certain network performance parameters (latency, rtt, packet loss, jitter) as well as a list of blocked or unreachable “Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges”.
I assume that your general (hybrid) cloud configuration with all related topics (AD Connect, DNS, … user license assignment) is fine, also to keep this post short. Otherwise, having infrastructure issues, you’d probably have not only an issue with Teams.
Where to find client logs for Teams? What’s the Teams client logs path?
These logs provide insights regarding media communication flows.
Debug logs shows flows regarding login, connection, call and conversations.
In case your infrastructure and connectivity is alright, the client logs may help to dig deeper into the issue analysis. Although, in my experience I rarely need these logs because often it comes down to an infrastructure and connectivity issue towards Microsoft Cloud services either for a single or multiple client endpoints.
Microsoft released a change for Skype for Business (SFB) meetings on Mac which enables you to use the desktop app for SFB on Mac instead of the SFB meeting app.
This is primarily applicable for SFB Online. It works for SFB Server 2015, too BUT it requires that the Microsoft Content Delivery Network (CDN) is used instead of the bites coming from your SFB Server 2015.
First you can check your current SFB Server 2015 configuration.
Get-CsWebServiceConfiguration | select Identity,MeetingUxUseCdn
This return your SFB Server web service configuration. If MeetingUxUseCdn is set to “True” everything is ok and CDN is used. If it is “False” you can enable it as follows.
Set-CsWebServiceConfiguration -MeetingUxUseCdn $True
Additionally and optionally, you could also enable Meeting Telemetry and / or change the join launcher CDN timeout (in case a client might be unable to connect/receive data from the CDN an needs to failback to the SFB Server meeting app binaries.
To check the as-is:
Get-CsWebServiceConfiguration | select Identity,MeetingUxUseCdn,MeetingUxEnableTelemetry,
JoinLauncherCdnTimeout
To enable telemetry (OPTIONAL, sends telemetry data to Microsoft*):
Set-CsWebServiceConfiguration -MeetingUxEnableTelemetry $True
To change the join launcher CDN timeout to 10 seconds:
Set-CsWebServiceConfiguration -JoinLauncherCdnTimeout (New-TimeSpan -Seconds 10)
To use the SFB desktop app on Mac for meetings should offer you a much better user experience. Microsoft says that this makes audio, video and sharing communication and collaboration more stable and reliable than it is with the SFB meeting app on Mac.
