This post is about the new configuration option for voicemail of Teams telephony users using the Microsoft Teams Admin Center (TAC). First of all, we’ll take a look onto what’s new in the TAC and what can be configured there. Afterwards we dive into the user’s perspective to compare if there is a difference. At last but not at least I’d like to reference to some Teams PowerShell cmdlets for voicemail configuration.

Most of the time, you would think that voicemail is no big deal. However, if you think in regards of corporate design/branding and things like that other topics might come to your mind like setting standardized announcement if someone is out of office or is unreachable or else. At least that were requests I received in the field, just to name one example.

Teams Admin – How to configure Teams voicemail?

By using the TAC you just have to navigate to users \ manage users \ user. On the tabs in the middle there should be a new one which is called Voicemail. It might be still in preview or rollout phase at the time of writing this (May 2022). I noticed that it was available in my test tenant but not in others by now.

In the voicemail setting’s top you can turn voicemail on (default) or off per user. Furthermore you can configure

• Prompt language
• Call answering mode
• Call transferring
• Default greeting prompt
• Default out-of-office-prompt
• Play out-of-office greetings

The call answering mode offers three options as depicted below.

In case a call should be transferred a transfer target can be set here if enabled.

How to configure voicemail policies?

Voicemail policies are also available in my test tenant by the time of writing this post. You can find the voicemail policy under the navigation’s group element voice. Hereinafter, I do not explain how to assign a policy to user.

In the voicemail policy you configure the following settings which as well shown in the next screenshot:

• Users can edit call answering rules
• Max. voicemail recording length
• Primary prompt language
• Secondary prompt language
• Voicemail transcription
• Translation for transcriptions
• Mask profanity in voicemail transcription
• Users can share data for service improvement
• Before the user’s greeting, play audio file [new January 2023]
• After the user’s greeting, play audio file [new January 2023]
• Disconnect the call if preamble or postamble cannot be played [new January 2023]

Teams voicemail user – How to configure voicemail?

Compared to the admin view a user can configure his voicemail in the Teams client settings underneath the Calls area. It is a bit hidden in my opinion but in the Calls settings there is the “Configure voicemail” button which opens up the voicemail settings.

As we can see the there are the same options for a user’s voicemail except the “Record a greeting” button. This enables a users to record his own greeting instead of using the text-to-speech one. That’s not available for the Teams admin in TAC.

The following screenshot contains the available call answer rules.

And at last but not at least the handling for out of office greetings. Which greeting should be played when.

Teams Admin – Configure voicemail en masse?

As usual if you want to configure e.g. the text to speech message for all/many users you might better use Teams PowerShell to write a script based on your needs. The documentation provides some examples on the Set-CsOnlineVoicemailUserSettings which can be used that’s why I do not dig deeper in cmdlets for Teams voicemail settings.

Conclusion, opinion and summary

As we can see in the TAC and client there is little to no difference between available and configurable options for voicemail settings. Of course the voicemail policies allow some more granular settings but the voicemail settings which can be set for a user in TAC compared to the ones a user can set by himself in the client are equal, I would say.

The progress and alignment we have noticed the last 5-6 months especially in regards of features to manage calling and telephony related topics were very welcome. I’m looking forward to further features, enhancements and alignments which improve the overall user and admin experience alike. There are many requests/proposals in Microsoft’s feedback portal for Teams and other products and services.

Additional resources

• Manage Voicemail Policies – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs
• Set-CsOnlineVoicemailUserSettings (SkypeForBusiness) | Microsoft Docs
• Jamie Stark auf Twitter: „New in #MicrosoftTeams voice admin: Voicemail policy & settings; Change usage for unassigned phone number; Disclaimer in emergency calling policy; Improved phone number search (except when > 10k numbers; fixing oddness here….). Check it all in Teams Admin Center! https://t.co/KOCLm2obCN“ / Twitter
• Microsoft Teams · Community Feedback Portal