Often we talk about Microsoft Teams voice as a single service workload. That is we assume organisations use only Calling Plans or Direct Routing. Whilst in cases this may be a correct assumption, the reality is that you can mix and match your voice service across all PSTN services supported by Teams.
In this situation, what is the process for moving a user from a Calling Plan to a Direct Routing configuration?
First, why would you do this? – A number of reasons really, but the most common would be that they have moved office locations from a Country that supported Calling Plans to another that doesn’t.
Now, you might think that it is easy and you are right! However, there is a process you will have to follow through exactly. Otherwise the user is left without a Caller ID and calls are processed as anonymous.invalid.
- Unassign the user their Calling Plan Phone Number
- Remove the Calling Plan License
- Reprocess the licensing from AzureAD portal
- Wait 30 minutes at least
- Log in to Teams PowerShell and set the OnPremLineURI attribute to the Direct Routing DDI and make sure the EnterpriseVoiceEnabled attribute is set to $true
- Assign Online Voice Routing Policy and Dialplan.
If you decide to skip step 1 and go straight to 2, the user see’s no DDI in their Dialpad in the Teams client.
They will be able to receive calls from Direct Routing to their DDI.
When they place an outbound call, it will route via Direct Routing, however the called party does not get their Caller ID. Instead it is anonymous as the SBC receives anonymous.invalid in the FROM and PAI header from Teams.
If you find yourself in this situation, to rectify it follow these steps:
- Login to the Teams Admin Center and find their old number in the Phone Number list (Admin // Voice // Phone Numbers)
- Remove the assignment
- Run Set-CsUser -Identity [email protected] -OnPremLineURI $null
- Reprocess their licensing in AzureAD Portal
- Run Set-CsUser -Identity [email protected] -OnPremLineURI tel:+441234567890 -EnterpriseVoiceEnabled $true
If you don’t run step 3 to 5, then the number never appears in the Teams client.
Removing a User
In a similar process of removing a user from a Calling Plan, it is not safe to assume that removing their Calling Plan license is enough. It isn’t. Doing this stops them making outbound calls, but does not stop them receiving them!
In addition, the number is still assigned to them and not released back into your pool of numbers. So you could end up with more assigned and otherwise available numbers and less unassigned numbers to give to other users.
Rule of thumb. remove the phone number assignment from Teams against the users before removing the license.
