As many organizations around the world are adopting Microsoft Teams as their enterprise communication and collaboration platform, the demand of IP desktop phones continues to be strong as companies replace their aging PBX phones in place of newer Teams certified IP Phones. Teams calling plans are now available in more countries and Direct Routing can be used virtually anywhere with a certified SBC. To ensure the best possible call quality when deploying Teams Phone system, QoS can be implemented so that the network is optimized for audio and/or video calling. Microsoft provides detailed documentation on how to implement QoS in teams and in this blogpost, we look at how it works with Teams certified IP Phones such as the Poly CCX family shown on the left. Click here for the complete list of devices.

In the July update for Microsoft Teams Room version 4.5.35.0, a new feature known as Direct Guest Join was released that allows MTR devices to join Cisco Webex meetings directly without any gateway or cloud interop service. This feature expands the capabilities of Teams Room Devices and allows interoperability with Cisco Webex meetings with one-click join functionality. In this blog post we explore the required steps to enable Direct Guest Join on MTR and the overall meeting experience and current limitations. In the future, we can expect MTR to support additional meeting ecosystems in the same way as well. Direct Guest Join leverages WebRTC technologies to allow MTR to join meetings hosted in CIsco Webex and other future meeting platforms.

In a previous blog bost various tips on deploying and managing Microsoft Teams Room (MTR) systems was discussed. One of the tips was how to manually update the Teams Room app running on the MTR. In this post, we dive deep and walk through the actual steps involved in updating the MTR system. As of this writing the latest Teams Room App version is 4.4.25.0 and readers may refer to the MTR Release Notes website to get the list of versions available. In this walkthrough we are following the manual update steps as stated in the official MTR Operations documentation for managing MTR systems, along with some potential issues to look out for while performing the process. My MTR system before starting the upgrade was running at version 4.3.42.0

In a previous blog post we walked through the steps to configure our Teams environment with Direct Routing for PSTN calling. In this blog post, we build on the same setup and enable Location Based Routing (LBR). Note that LBR for Teams Direct Routing is a preview or early release feature at the time of this writing as stated in the official Microsoft documentation. For readers unfamiliar with LBR, this capability allows admins to prevent PSTN Toll-Bypass which is against regulatory requirements in certain countries. By configuring LBR, we can restrict toll bypass based on policy and the user's geographic location at the time of an inbound or outbound PSTN call. We can then verify that the LBR policies will also apply to certified Teams IP Phones such as the Poly CCX Family of Teams phones.

Microsoft Teams is fast becoming the #1 collaboration platform in the enterprise. In particular the voice workload has been steadily gaining momentum as more companies move to Teams voice. There are now many choices of certified Teams IP Handsets in the market which is helping to drive adoption even more. As large organizations deploy thousands of these devices in their network, there is a need for centralized management and provisioning so IT admins can make sure these devices are working smoothly. Fortunately, Microsoft provides the Teams admin portal which has a section dedicated to managing these Teams IP Phones. In this blog post we'll walk through the various management capabilities of this portal in managing certified Teams phone devices such as the Poly CCX family of Teams phones.

​Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) is solution that transforms meeting spaces ranging from small huddle areas to large conference rooms with a rich, collaborative Teams experience that's simple to use, deploy, and manage. This is because the MTR provides a native Teams experience by running a specific Teams Room App on a Windows10 compute device. MTR has been steadily gaining momentum over the last 12-18 months as users enjoy the ability to start meetings on time with one-touch join, then instantly project to the display in the room and share to remote participants. As of this writing, MTR systems along with the necessary peripherals such as cameras and speaker/mics are available from Yealink, Logitech, Crestron, Poly, Lenovo, and HP. In this article we explore the various tips and best practices to get MTR running quickly and smoothly and look at the various ways to manage the system.

Whilst the industry momentum is going towards adopting Microsoft Teams as the successor to Skype for Business, there will still be organizations that have yet to fully migrate to Teams and may continue to use Skype for Business for the interim term, particularly for companies that have invested in and leveraging Microsoft Phone System with SFB Online and hybrid voice. Whether its using CCE or Skype On-Prem Cloud Hybrid, their users are able to make PSTN calls via a local SBC with the associated SIP Trunk or E1/T1 lines. For these environments, it is desirable to retain PSTN calling in the event that the WAN connection to Office365 becomes unavailable. In this blog post, we walk through the steps on how to configure a Ribbon SBC1000 for PSTN failover such that if the WAN connection to O365 is disrupted, Skype certified IP Phones will lose connectivity to SFB Online but yet still be able to make PSTN calls via a secondary SIP connection to the SBC

In the previous blog post a Ribbon SBC1000 was configured for Teams Direct Routing using SIP Trunk from Masergy and tests calls made using the new Poly CCX Native Teams phones. That setup was configured with the default non media-bypass where media always flowed between the SBC and Microsoft Office365 Teams media processors or relays. As a follow up to that, this blog posts walks through the configuration of media bypass in the same lab setup, allowing media to flow directly between the Teams phones and the SBC, thereby simplifying the media flow allowing for potentially better call quality. Since it is fairly straightforward to configure media bypass, this post also provides wireshark packet capture on the SBC to show the media flow between non media-bypass and media-bypass calls

In a previous blog post a technical deep dive on deploying enterprise voice on Microsoft Teams was provided. In this post, we supplement and complete the discussion holistically by providing configuration guidance of a certified Session Border Controller (SBC) for Direct Routing. In this lab, we leverage the same tenant with Office365 E5 licenses and deploy a Ribbon (formerly Sonus) SBC1000 along with a PSTN SIP Trunk from Masergy including DID numbers. Detailed configuration screen shots of the SBC will be provided along with explanatory notes. Special thanks to DMUnified for assistance with the SBC!

In the previous blog post, we covered the details of deploying 802.1x EAP-TLS on Polycom VVX phones using Cisco 2960X switch and Windows NPS RADIUS server. Deploying device certificates manually on the phones can be a time consuming process especially for high security environments when a unique device certificate is required for each phone. With the release of UCS5.9.3 firmware in June this year, Polycom VVX phones now support Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol SCEP for easy requesting and assigning devices certificates for 802.1x EAP-TLS authentication. This blog post builds upon the same lab environment of the previous post but describes in detail how to add and deploy SCEP.

​This is part 2 of the previous blog post on how to deploy 802.1x EAP-TLS authentication on Polycom VVX phones using Cisco 2960X switch and Windows Server 2012 R2 NPS RADUIS. In this post, we continue to configure and obtain certificates for the VVX and connect the phone to the 802.1x enabled port on the switch to get EAP-TLS authentication and having been allowed, proceed to obtain an IP address from the Windows DHCP server. It's worthwhile to review the previous post before continue reading this post.

The 802.1X protocol is an IEEE Standard for port-based Network Access Control and part of the IEEE 802.1 group of networking protocols. It provides an authentication mechanism to devices wishing to attach to a LAN or WLAN. Many organizations have already implemented 802.1x for PCs and laptops connecting to their enterprise network and many are now also mandating devices such as IP Phones and digital whiteboards to comply with 802.1x security standard. This blog post walks through how to setup 802.1x with EAP-TLS authentication on a Polycom VVX phone within a lab environment. Part 1 will focus on the overview, configuring the Cisco Switch and the Windows NPS RADIUS server.

As mentioned in an earlier blog article, Microsoft Teams is not only a great team collaboration application with built-in intelligent communications, its also a powerful extensible platform that allows applications to be embedded within teams channels that make collaboration even richer and customizable. As of today, Microsoft Teams already contains hundreds of 3rd party apps published in the Teams store which users can easily install and add to their channels so that everyone in the team can leverage and use. It's also very simple to publish custom built apps and make it available in Teams. This blog posts walks through the steps publishing of a chat bot that can help answer user questions about the upcoming Microsoft Build Conference 2019 from May 6-8 at the Washington State Convention Center, Seattle WA. No coding is required to build this bot and in addition to MS Teams, we can even connect the bot to other additional chat services such as Telegram, Skype and Facebook Messenger

In a previous blog post, the ability to use Skype for Business certified IP Phones in a Teams environment was discussed and how users who have migrated from Skype for Business to Teams can continue to use these IP phones to make and receive calls. In this post, we continue the discussion and provide an overview of how Teams users can be enable for enterprise voice. Unlike its predecessor, Teams is a pure cloud service and there are no on-premise Teams servers, and hence majority of the Voice configurations have to be performed in the O365 tenant using powershell. Our tenant has a E5 license which enables the Phone System (formely CloudPBX) feature for this to work, but E1/E3 users can also be enabled via the Add-on license

This month we finally got the release of Skype for Business 2019 Server for on-premises which clearly demonstrates Microsoft's continued commitment and support for customers still staying on-premises with Skype for Business. With this release, mainstream support will continue at least through to 2023 which gives customers not ready yet for Teams the ability to stay with a current version of Skype for Business. This release also comes with a host of new features and in this blog post we'll cover a quick Standard Edition installation walk-thru as well as an overview of these new features, In future blog posts we'll configure these new features in more detail and depth. The steps provided here are a shortened version of the detailed deployment guide from Microsoft available at ​https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SkypeForBusiness/skype-for-business-server-2019 

Microsoft Teams continues its strong momentum of market adoption not just among enterprise customers but also with hardware vendors as evident from the many announcements made at Microsoft Ignite that just ended 2 days ago. There are now various personal and shared audio and video devices that customers can use natively with Microsoft Teams and the list can be found at this website http://office.com/teamsdevices. At the same time, many organizations that are moving from Skype for Business Enterprise voice and who have deployed 3PIP certified Skype for Business IP phones may be asking if these devices can still be used after moving to Teams. Thankfully, the answer is yes because of a SFB-Teams interop service that Microsoft provides which allows these 3PIP devices to interop with Teams; thereby protecting customer's investment while migrating from Skype for Business. This blog post explains how this interop works and what configurations are necessary to leverage this interop service

Back in January this year I wrote a blog post about Skype for Business Interop with Teams and how to deploying Teams side-by-side with Skype for Business, how to configure the interop policy and getting teams users and skype users together on a meeting, Limitations of the interop at that time were also discussed. Last month Microsoft released new updates to the interop capabilities and this post serves as an update to what's changed and how to deploy Skype and Teams side by side moving forward.

Microsoft Teams is not only a great team collaboration application with built-in intelligent communications, its also a powerful extensible platform that allows applications to be embedded within teams channels that make collaboration even richer and customizable. As of today, Microsoft Teams already contains hundreds of 3rd party apps published in the Teams store which users can easily install and add to their channels so that everyone in the team can leverage and use. It's also very simple to publish custom built apps and make it available in Teams. This blog posts walks through and the steps publishing of a sample node.js app provided by Microsoft in this article and shows how easy it is to extend the Teams platform with custom built applications.

Microsoft Teams is a powerful collaboration application with built-in intelligent communications and is also a highly extensible platform that can leverag 3rd party or custom built applications which can be embedded right into Teams channels to make collaboration even richer. Today's teams are geographically dispersed, and yet need to make fast decisions based on real-time market or customer data, for which Microsoft Teams is the all-in collaboration and communication tool. What makes it even more powerful is the fact that external users such as partner organizations, suppliers or vendors can be added as guests into Teams to extend intelligent collaboration to these users who are not part of your organization. This blog post walks through how to enable Guest Access in Teams and its experience.

In the previous blog post, we walked through the features of Skype for Business and Teams co-existence and also covered how to configure interoperability between these two popular communications platforms. In this blog post, we take a close peek under the hood of what goes on when a user on Teams makes a video call to Skype for Business user homed on-premise. Using the Skype for Business server debugging tools, we capture the SIP messages to get a more in-depth technical understanding of video interoperability between the Teams cloud and an on-premise Skype for Business Server

Since last September's Microsoft’s Ignite 2017 conference in Orlando where the company announced that Microsoft Teams will be the future successor to Skype for Business, many customers have been deploying Microsoft Teams as the all-up client to meet the collaboration and communication demands of today's modern workplace. Microsoft Teams brings together many of Office365 services in one place and supersedes Skype's unified communications with intelligent communications. Even now Microsoft is busy porting over all of the calling and conferencing capabilities from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams and new features are being brought in continuously. This blog post covers some of the features of running Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams side-by-side and what interoperability features are available at the time of this writing.

Skype Room System v2 (SRSv2) meeting room solutions are now available in many countries where Surface Pro devices are sold. Since it's launch last year, SRSv2 devices have been available from several vendors including Polycom, Logitech, Crestron and soon to be available from Lenovo as well. While all these vendors provide devices with different physical characteristics and dimensions, the software that powers these devices comes from Microsoft - more specifically, a SurfacePro 5 device running Windows10 operating system and the Skype Room app which provides the user interface and main functionality of the device. This blog post covers 5 tips on how to configure the SRSv2 device and are applicable for solutions from any of the vendors listed above.

Since the May 2017 cumulative update for Skype for Business, modern authentication has been available for Skype for Business on-premise. This blog post covers what hybrid modern authentication (HMA) is, why you should use it, what are the limitations and how to deploy it for a Skype for Business on-premise Hybrid environment with Azure AD. We will walk through step-by-step how to configure the on-premise servers and the Office365 tenant and look at how HMA affects Skype for Business certified IP Phones.

In a previous blog post we covered how to deploy Cloud Connector Edition 1.4.1 in a single site lab environment and registering certified IP Phones to CloudPBX. Microsoft has recently released CCE v.20 based on customer feedback which brings several significant improvements and addresses some of the key limitations of v1.4.1. This blog posts covers what the new features are, what are the requirements to enable these new features. For more information and deployment guidance on CCE2.0 as well as downloading the bits, the link will be most useful: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt605227.aspx