Skype for Business

Microsoft have recently announced that they will be retiring Skype for Business Online on 31st July 2021. After this time, you will no longer be able to access Skype for Business Online. If you’ve been paying attention this isn’t a massive surprise. Teams is the new-ish kid on the block, getting all the attention and had been earmarked as Microsoft’s communication and collaboration tool moving forwards. Once ‘feature-parity’ was announced, Skype for Business Online’s days were numbered. ...

Last Updated: 2nd October 2019 Introduction This article will give an explanation of the Teams Call Queues (CQ) and Auto Attendants (AA) - what they are and how to set them up. You could previously create and administer the “SfB” CQ and AA in the (legacy) Skype for Business Admin Centre, but these have now been migrated as “Teams” CQ and AA in to the Teams Admin Centre. There are some key differences between the two versions that I will highlight: ...

Introduction You may from time to time have run in to an issue where an Teams/SfB user has not been provisioned correctly. The most common scenario for this is a delay in Office 365 provisioning the user - you have assigned the required SfB/Teams licenses and it has yet to become available to the end user (it is not uncommon for licenses to take over 24 hours to be provisioned). ...

Last Updated: 15/5/2019 Introduction Microsoft have announced that from July 1st 2019 January 15th 2020, the shared Azure AD application/client that all 3PIP (3rd party) phones currently use will be revoked. Moving forward, each vendor will need to issue thier own specific Azure AD application. This means that if you have 3PIP phones that connect to Skype or Exchange Online you will be impacted. Will I be impacted? Here are the following 3PIP deployment scenarios (taken from a very helpful AudioCodes article) and wether any action is required: ...

Introduction Had this one recently. Just before ‘go-live’ we had an issue whereby some users were unable to receive calls. On testing, we noticed that an affected user had delegates (or a team-call) set to ring. Disabling the delegates from receiving calls and it worked again. If the delegates were set to ring after 0 seconds, the user got a missed call each second the call was not ringing. Odd! ...

Recently added to Skype Online and Teams is the ability to block inbound calls based on their caller ID. Useful for blocking nuisance callers. Once you’ve added the patterns, you ideally want to know: If the calling numbers you want to block will be caught in your patterns. Regex is not my strong suit so want to make sure it will match. Are some calls going to be inadvertently blocked? If you have many rules it might not be apparent which pattern(s) are blocking it. I’ve set up a pattern called test to demonstrate this. The pattern will match +441234567890 or 441234567890: ...

Introduction In all my deployments of SRS up until now, I’ve used are using the same SIP domain and UPN or they’ve 100% Office 365, so not come across this before. In my scenario I had: Internal AD domain domain.co.uk - Used for the user’s UPN - in this scenario 100% on-premises so no Azure AD - they saw no need to change users UPN to match SIP domain. External domain domain.com - Used for SIP domain ...

Introduction For Skype Online there are various tools to report on user sessions: Call Analytics - This is great for looking at a user’s call history when diagnosing call issues. This is similar to the data we can glean from on-premises SSRS reports. Call Quality Dashboard - Again, great for looking at overall trends or metrics of call quality to pinpoint issues. Session Details - This is accessed from the Skype Admin Centre. Reports are very similar to Call Analytics. ...

Introduction Following on from my blog post about monitoring SfB and CCE in Azure OMS and Power BI, then recently deploying a Skype Room System (SRS) for the first time, I came across monitoring SRS devices via Azure OMS. This seems a good idea, much like it did for CCEs, as these are unmanaged devices spread across the network where you might not always have someone on hand to keep an eye on them. As they are effectively Windows machines, this is a pretty straightforward process. ...

Edit 09/07/18 - There is now an easier, supported method to achieve this here. Introduction For a while, I’ve been running SBCs and other virtual machines for my lab on physical servers, which consume a fair bit of power and most of the time sit there unused. I’ve managed to move other machines to Azure but wanted to also move an AudioCodes SBC too. One thought when Direct Route arrives, I could have a whole PSTN calling lab in Azure to play with. ...