MSTeams feature parity with Skype for Business Online

Just last Friday Microsoft announced in their blog page https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Microsoft-Teams-is-now-a-complete-meeting-and-calling-solution/ba-p/236042 that MS Teams now has all the meetings and calling functionality of Skype for Business Online. The article describes how MSTeams is now a complete meeting and calling solution and a Teams Conferencing Gateway, which allows you to use existing Skype for Business certified SIP-based phones with Teams; and USB HID Support for Teams, enabling customers to answer, end calls and control mute and volume using USB peripherals. In addition, cloud video interop services to support Teams meetings with existing VTC systems are underway with offerings from Pexip, Polycom, and Blue Jeans to be generally available later this calendar year. Of course this does not mean that the roadmap has been competed as there are additional features coming in Q4 of this year as can be seen in the MS Roadmap available here: http://aka.ms/skype2teamsroadmap. The purpose of this blog post is to serve as an add-on to go into detail the configuration of the O365 tenant to allow for calls to work between MSTeams and Skype for Business users. 

Before we begin, probably the best resource available for MSTeams and SFB interop is this website: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-sg/MicrosoftTeams/migration-interop-guidance-for-teams-with-skype which describes the various modes of co-existence and interop along with the policies required. In this blog, we have Polycom VVX signed into an SFB Online account, and a Teams account logged in via a Polycom Trio8800 conference phone running a beta version of Teams which TAP customers are currently testing. This beta version of Teams on Trio8800 is expected be available later this year. In order to get the two devices to be able to call each other, its important to review the interop settings that are required on the tenant. The table below shows the different co-existence modes and how the calls will behave depending on the upgrade policy set on the caller and the recipient:

There are two ways to configure the above interop settings, First, there is the SkypeTeams admin portal which can be accessed from this webpage https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/company-wide-settings/teams-upgrade. However, as of this writing there are only 2 options available in this portal: "Skype for Business Only" and "Islands" as shown below:

Both of these options in the portal are set at the tenant level, and will result in only the Teams user (Polycom Trio8800) being able to call the Skype user (Polycom VVX600) while the Skype user calling the Teams user will end up in Voicemail even if the Teams user is online. This can be seen from the matrix above. In order to allow bi-directional calling between Teams user and Skype user, we need to set the upgrade policy and interop policy using remote powershell. To begin this, we first look at the various upgrade polices available in powershell using the Get-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy cmdlet as shown below:

Note that the above policies are built-in and that the Set-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy is no longer available although it still appears in TechNet documentation. At the time of this writing, setting the TeamsUpgradePolicy will also require a matching TeamsInteropPolicy but note that icrosoft plans to reture the TeamsinteropPolicy in the near future. In order get Teams and SfB users to be able to call each other on their respective clients, we can assign the following polices:
                                               TeamsUpgradePolicy                                                     TeamsInteropPolicy
                                            =================================                    ==================================
Teams User or Phone         UpgradeToTeams (TeamsOnly)                                       DisallowOverrideCallingTeamsChatTeams
SFB User or Phone             Islands (Teams and SFB but no modality overlap)           DisallowOverrideCallingSFBChatSFB

This is shown in the picture below where sturner@ucprimer.com is the Teams user using Teams client or phone, and hrodin@ucprimer.com is the SFB user using SFB client or SFB Phone:

With this policy in place, we can now test calling between SFB user and Teams user. Since I cannot show the screen from the Trio8800 running teams, the diagrams will just show the regular Windows10 Teams client, First, from the Teams client we open the SFB contact and note that there's already a note stating the limitations of using a Teams client to communicate with a SFB user as shown below:

On the VVX logged into SFB as Helen, we initiate a phone call to Susan who is using Teams:

After a short delay, the call comes into the Teams client and a pop-up alert is shown and we can answer the call to establish the P2P call:

Similarly, we can initiate a call from the Team user Susan by pressing the "Phone" icon on the top right of the Teams client, which will then result in the call coming into the VVX phone:

In conclusion, Microsoft has delivered on its promise to bring calling and meeting features of SFB into Teams and with the latest updates, the gateway for 3PIP qualified phones are now interoperable with Teams users, with the small caveat that the SFB accounts for both users must be homed online at this time, and this will be addressed in the near future where SFB on-premise users will also be able to do the same. Microsoft will continuing to roll-out new features and updates in the coming months where we can expect more feature parity between the two applications, and there will certainly be blog posts covering these coming soon!