Martin Gibney - Microsoft Teams

 Microsoft have snuck in a nice new feature into the Teams Admin Center (TAC). We now see a new Notifications and Alerts  menu tree and below this Rules. When we go in here, we find only a single Default  Device State Rule with no option to create any new rules (yet at least...) When we edit this rule, we can see that we now have an option to monitor specific devices (think meeting room devices, collaboration bars etc.. here) Under Device users  we click on +ADD  then enter the name of the account, or accounts if you are monitoring multiple devices, associated with the device, such as the resource account. Then under Actions  we can choose either Channel alert  - to have a nice alert sent to our Teams Channel   OR Webhook  to use webhooks for alerting. Finally ensure to select Active  then Save. Once set up this will take maybe 15 mins to replicate and set up. Then once a device has gone offline, the alert will be sent "Immediately", how...

 Teams client is now making it much easier for troubleshooting call quality in real time. Microsoft have added a Call Health option menu to our ellipses (...) menu. Once in a call and we click on this menu, we will see details for the following: Network Audio Video Screen Sharing For each of these there is a sub menu under View more xxxx data >  and in here we see a breakdown of each area. Depending on the type of call, you will see some data not shown (no Screen Sharing details if you are not sharing anything!!) Network: Teams Send Limit: This is the max limit Teams can send based on current network path conditions and utilisation. This is NOT your SIP speed limit. Teams Receive Limit: This is the max limit Teams can receive based on current network path conditions and utilisation. This is NOT your SIP speed limit. Round Trip Time: Response time between your system and Teams server. Lower is better. Received Packet Loss: The results of a bad network. Lower is better. A...

With the imminent retirement of Skype for Business Online (SFBO) on July 31 2021, some of my customers have had concerns that they still rely on having users in SFBOnly mode for things like Attendant Console. As there are still delays in API releasing from Microsoft, the release of this software to General Release is unlikely to happen by this date. NOTE: this does NOT affect Skype for Business Server (On-Premise) as this is still supported into the future.. Luckily, Microsoft have realised this too and are now offering to extend SFBO retirement date on a per tenant basis. This means that if you have users enabled for SFBO in your tenant, you should get notified in the coming days in the Teams Admin Center (TAC) that;  Good news! Your Microsoft Teams upgrade has been scheduled.  (Like the screenshot below) And as you can see they are allowing a Request extension  option for us.  You should go ahead and click on this if you do require SFBO after July 31st. Go ahead an...

When we have a scenario whereby a customer has offices in two main global regions, we want to ensure traffic remains within the region where possible. For this post we assume our two regions are the US and the EU. We create and deploy a separate SBC in each region. We want to keep  24*7 phone availability so we install one SBC in Azure US and another in Azure EU. This way we provide the customer with very highly available base for the SBCs. The deployment of the SBC itself is outside the scope of this post but will be covered in another separate post. We configure the SBCs in a failover scenario in that if the primary SBC for the site is unavailable, then the call will automatically route (after 5 seconds – using the -FailoverTimeSeconds parameter) to the SBC in the opposite site. We do this through the use of the - FailoverResponseCodes in the Set-CsOnlinePSTNGateway command. We can find a full list of SIP response codes here: https://www.3cx.com/pbx/sip-responses/ A co...