Silence when Microsoft Teams queue call put on hold

On February 11, 2020February 11, 2020 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Microsoft365, Modern Workplace, Skype for business, Teams1 Comment

Recently I noticed at one of our major client’s Teams Voice setup that on hold music never played for queues when agents put callers on hold, instead it goes silent which makes callers wondering what’s going on with the call.

This is a vital feature specially for a call queue as it gives clarity for callers to understand the status of the call. Agents mostly put callers on hold to get things done offline to meet callers requirements so the music of course make the caller relaxed while agent helping them out behind the scene.

First thing I had to check is, if the feature is enabled from the Teams Admin Centre –> Call Queues –> Choose the affected queue –> Of course it has

However, it seemed the file hasn’t recognized by Teams or probably the file is faulty which could have caused the silence during hold. Till I locate the original file, I added a temporary classic music clip to verify if that picks by Teams. And it did ! Hold music played like charm when the agent put me on hold.

Moving Microsoft Teams Data Location

On February 2, 2020March 2, 2020 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Office 365, Skype for business, TeamsLeave a comment

If you are a existing Office 365 customer who have been waiting Microsoft to allow you to move your Teams data location, It’s now time to do it.

Office 365 now allows you to decide where your Teams data residency should be. We have noticed that most of our clients got their Data residency set to Australia as the data region.

Microsoft now offer existing O365 customers listed in the following table an option to request early migration of organization’s core customer data at rest to their new datacenter geo.

Changing the geo location is completely taken care by Microsoft behind the scene. You as a customer, only have to opt-in to allow Microsoft to do this in the backend (despite your request, this will anyway happen eventually) and the change is seamless with no user interaction, interruption.

To see your current data location for each workload, go to Office 365 Admin center –> Settings –> Settings –> Organization Profile

Navigate to Data Location to see where your data currently resides

Switch to Data Residency and “check the tick box” below to opt-in. You will not see this option if:

Your tenant is not eligible for the Office 365 Move Program. Eligibility is determined by tenant signup country.
All of your core customer data at rest is already located in the new geo (see Data Location section of the page).

And wait for a few months as advised in the notification. Microsoft will notify you stage-wise in the Office 365 Message center when the activity is being actioned or completed.

Note: The information on this page only applies to customers who had existing Office 365 tenants before the new datacenters in their geo launched.

More details are here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/Office365/Enterprise/request-your-data-move

Configure routing all incoming calls to Teams client

On November 7, 2018February 15, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Skype for business, TeamsLeave a comment

Our internal IT team was in the mission of setting up calling feature of Microsoft teams ad we discovered that the calls are not directly routed to user devices. Users can dial out from Teams clients, Desktop and mobile both however, Teams client automatically diverts incoming calls to voice mailbox.

With this post, I am going to explain through the steps of the analysis of the issue and how we managed to configure Teams coexistence mode to route incoming calls to the Teams client.

During our discovery:

We went through Call forwarding settings in Teams client on several devices (Teams Client > Settings > Calls > Call Forwarding Settings) and figured out that call forwarding is disabled. Which basically proves our first assumption is out. Client side forwarding option isn’t the cause of this issue.
Then checked Skype for business admin center to find out if any helpful entries are there as it provides PSTN usage detail reports on inbound or outbound calls. Anyhow, this had nothing to offer in our case so that’s out as well.

However, having a Microsoft calling plan to connect to the PSTN is mandatory. Ensure that you have a calling plan applied to your tenant and then you can go ahead and assign phone numbers to your users from Skype for Business and Teams Admin Centers. Calling plans are detailed in this Microsoft write-up.

Call routing is depends on the coexistence mode configurations defined in the Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center. Coexistence offers the flexibility of configuring in two different scopes.

User context
Tenant context (Organization wide)

It simply means that, if you configure the coexistence in user context mode while tenant context exists too, tenant context will be overwritten by the user-context mode. Above chart explains the behavior of each scenario.

Now in our scenario, this tenant was configured as the coexistence mode islands, hence any of our calls were automatically transferred to the Skype for Business client. However, because we didn’t have Skype for Business downloaded on our devices, we didn’t receive any of these calls. Once we had updated these settings and waited for it to sync with Office 365, calls were simply received in Teams client.

Here are the steps taken to achieve this. First, log in to your Office 365 tenant using Global Admin account, and, head on to Admin centers –> all Admin centers –> Click on “Teams and Skype”