Tagged: Meetings

Microsoft Teams Telephony Licensing Notes [Update April 2020]

In this post I like to point out some updated licensing options for Microsoft Teams regarding telephony, common area phones and meeting rooms.

The hereinafter described license options might be subject to change. Moreover not all licenses or subscriptions are available in every country around the globe, especially calling plans and audio conferencing (shortened: Audioconf.).

Teams Licensing Basics

  • Microsoft Teams is a single service of the massiv Microsoft 365 services stack which it tightly linked and integrated within this service stack.
  • Microsoft Teams is part of a “packaged” Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions by default.
  • Microsoft Teams “replaces” Skype for Business Online (SFB Online EOL date July 31, 2021). The Skype for Business Desktop Client within Office 365 ProPlus is also obsolete, meaning that new (full) Office 365 ProPlus installation will get a Teams instead of a Skype for Business Client.

The following slides and drawing are intended to provide you with an overview on licensing options. I also point out what you should take into account in case of Teams Direct Routing (TDR), in this post and following drawings I call a TDR scenario a “hybrid” scenario.

Telephony with Teams (for users)

Call Queues (CQ) and Auto Attendants (AA)

Resource accounts for CQ/AA need a license. Till 01.07.2019 you had to license these users with typical user licenses. Now you can buy and assign a free “Phone System Virtual User license”.

At the bottom I’ll add a link to a well-written how-to post “Add a free licence to Call Queues and Auto Attendants (Microsoft Teams)” from ucgeek.com which describes how to buy and assign the license.

Teams Common Area Phone (CAP)

Teams Meeting Room

Conclusion, opinion and summary

The above drawings quickly depict how you can license users, common area phones, meeting room devices and even call queues or auto attendants for Microsoft Teams.

Additional Resources

What’s new in Microsoft Teams in April 2020?

In this post I like to highlight some new and planned Microsoft Teams features based on the latest roadmap updates by Microsoft. The last few days many updates were made to the Microsoft Teams roadmap. There are several neat feature updates for Microsoft Teams which will be rolled out soon, are rolling out now or which are already available. Let me give you an overview on these.

Source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/landscape-hill-sky-clouds-hilly-922581/
Source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/landscape-hill-sky-clouds-hilly-922581/

Meetings and live events

  • end meetings | as an host you can now end meetings. So nobody can remain in the meeting to proceed or use the online meeting space.
  • audioconferening dialin user number masking | PSTN participant phone numbers will be masked from external users [~May 2020]
  • background effects in meetings | use background (pre-selected) images to enable other participants to focus on you and reduce distraction. later also custom background images.
  • raise hands in Teams meetings | attendees can rais their virtual hand to notify the presenter that there is a person who would like to speak
  • share system audio in a meeting
  • share system audio in a live event

Voice / telephony

Microsoft 365 Business Voice | Microsoft 365 phone system capabilities are available for SMB organizations with up to 300 seats as addon license for the smaller licensing bundles (business plan/s).

So, also business plans are enabled to go for calling plans and/or Direct Routing to enable (pstn) telephony to/from Microsoft Teams.

Chat

Multi window chat | Ability to pop out a chat in a separate chat window

Security

Microsoft adds Azure AD Premium Plan 1 to M365 Business plans which provides feature like

  • conditional access,
  • self-service password reset and
  • multi-factor authentication (MFA) to secure your identities.
  • Plus some more features like Cloud App Discovery (to discover used apps which you might were not aware that these are used within your company),
  • application proxy,
  • dynamic groups,
  • passwordless auth (Windows Hello for Business, Microsoft Authenticator app, FIDO 2).

All this helps to make your communication and collaboration for your business more secure. Especially for SMBs (up to 300 seats). This is really compelling due to price and feature set. Until know you had to get enterprise plans for this to get the option to add these features to your Microsoft 365 deployment.

Conclusion, opinion and summary

Microsoft now really pushes out these features and changes to enable small and medium sized business (SMBs) to securely communicate and collaborate at a reasonable price. To me, MFA (for all) was long awaited in this licensing segment because nowadays MFA should be the imperative anyway.

Additional resources