brown gift box with pink ribbon

Teams Phone – a little christmas wishlist

After Microsoft Inspire, impressive figures on Teams usage were published and shared, especially about the explosion of  Teams Phone users. This makes it all the more sad, that basic or helpful functions are still not fully available.

I am mostly thrilled by Microsoft’s solutions, nevertheless it’s also important for me to reveal functionalities with potential for improvement – in the interests of my customers waiting for it.

I would like to point out two examples bringing me into distress several times this year. Not at least, because 3rd party solutions like Attendant Consoles or Contact Centers are depending on them.

Music on Hold

This feature seems to be a challenge for Microsoft. In the beginning, MoH was not supported at all during call transfer, but Direct Routing allowed a workaround via the local SBC. In the meantime, MoH is supported for consultative transfer – but due to the sendreceive flags in the SIP messages coming from Microsoft, it is no longer possible to provide MoH via the local SBC during blind transfer.

For the Safe Transfer feature the result is even worse: Customers tell me again and again, callers hang up if it remains silent in the line for too long during call transfer.

Collaborative Calling

I was personally very happy about the announcement with Microsoft Ignite 2020: What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2020 – Microsoft Tech Community

A dashboard like this had always been missing in Skype for Business. Even if the announced capabilities were basics, they were much appreciated for managing calls in a group.

Reality 2022: Apart from the fact that the function is still only available in the Desktop Client, the actual range of functions remains far below expectations.

Shared call history

Each agent can only see his or her own call history, instead of the group’s history. So no collaborative call management after all.

Voice mail

Voicemail messages are not displayed at all in the calling tab, even if the GUI arouses this expectation. If the group voicemail is activated in the call distribution, the team members receive the voicemail message as an MP3 file by e-mail. Quite old-fashioned.

Both features are on my personal Christmas wish list for 2022. Maybe after the summer rain of new features in Teams, the Product Group will be allowed in autumn or winter to improve already existing calling features.

Published by Natalie Jeschner

Natalie quit her profession as a social worker 2000 and started her IT career as a support employee. She sticked to error analysis and troubleshooting in enterprise infrastructures for 15 years and discovered her passion for Collaboration, Unified Communication and VoIP during that time. Her focus is on the design and implementation of VoIP infrastructures with Microsoft UC solutions for several years now.