Direct Routing in Microsoft Teams
What It Is:
If you’ve never had the experience of a telephony-connected desktop, you’re missing out on an incredibly powerful productivity tool. While I’ve spent most of the past 15 years focused on document and team collaboration technology, much of the first decade of my career was spent in telecom, first for Pacific Telesis followed by Pacific Bell Mobile Services (which became Pacific Bell Wireless, then Cingular, and is now AT&T Wireless), and then NorthPoint Communications in San Francisco. While much of this experience went cold long ago, some of the learning stuck, which comes in use whenever I speak to a Microsoft Teams person who focuses on the telecom side of the stack — and why I was excited to see the preview and then GA of this capability last summer, with recent updates to the plans and documentation. The ability to see someone’s availability in Teams (or any other Office 365 workload) with the presence indicator and then right-click to see a menu of options to reach out to that person (email, chat, video, call) is an amazing feature. Yes, it’s been around for years through Skype for Business and its forbearers, but now we have that capability in Teams! Here is more info on the capability, and how to configure it (assuming you have the right licence type, as always):
High-level Description:
From Techcommunity.microsoft.com:
Direct Routing is a capability of Phone System in Office 365 to help customers connect their SIP trunks to Microsoft Teams. In the simplest deployment model, customers start with SIP trunks from their telecommunications provider. Next, customers will use and configure a supported Session Border Controller (SBC) from one of our certified partners. Finally, they will connect their SBC to Microsoft Teams and Phone System.
Besides the primary Direct Routing scenario, we anticipate customers will want to use this capability to integrate with other 3rd party voice applications. There are several additional scenarios: [Read More]
Recent News/Media:
“Direct Routing is now Generally Available!”
Starting today, Microsoft Phone System Direct Routing is now generally available. Direct Routing allows customers to choose their telecom provider to enable their users to make and receive calls in Teams. If your country is supported by Teams and Phone System you can start planning and deploying Direct Routing in your organization today. Direct Routing and Calling Plans are now your 2 choices for dial tone in Microsoft Teams. [Read More]
“Microsoft Teams Direct Routing explained”
Microsoft Teams Direct Routing is General Available as of June 28 2018. This is the means for you to bring your own SIP trunk to Microsoft Teams. To be clear, this will only give your Teams users PSTN connectivity, your Skype for Business Online users still needs to use CCE or Skype for Business Server hybrid to get PSTN connectivity.
The goal of this article is to explain the basic around Direct Routing from an infrastructure point of view. [Read More]
Support Articles:
“Quick start guide: Configuring Calling Plans in Microsoft Teams”
This guide will help you get a set of users up and running so they can explore Calling Plans in Teams. [Read More]
Microsoft Phone System Direct Routing lets you connect a supported, customer-provided Session Border Controller (SBC) to Microsoft Phone System. With this capability, for example, you can configure on-premises PSTN connectivity with Microsoft Teams client, as shown in the following diagram: [Read More]
If you have not already done so, read Plan Direct Routing for prerequisites and to review other steps you’ll need to take before you configure your Microsoft Phone System network.
This article describes how to configure Microsoft Phone System Direct Routing. It details how to pair a supported Session Border Controller (SBC) to Direct Routing and how to configure Microsoft Teams users to use Direct Routing to connect to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). [Read More]
This article describes what is needed to migrate to Direct Routing from a Skype for Business Online and Microsoft Teams configuration perspective. This article covers migrating from the following:
- Office 365 Phone System with Calling Plans (for Teams and Skype for Business Online)
- Office 365 Phone System with on-premises PSTN Connectivity in Skype for Business Server (for Skype for Business Online)
- Office 365 Phone System with on-premises PSTN Connectivity by using the Cloud Connector Edition (for Skype for Business Online) [Read More]
“Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams #Review-1-2”
One fundamental and critical enhancement Direct Routing needs is to have a “monitoring feature” -as basic as an admin/support team getting an email alert when a paired SBC (PSNT Gateway) is down by monitoring, for example, port 5061 – this should be a built-in fundamental component of DR – helping customers achieve more and complementing what DR already has. [Read More]
Relevant Videos:
Preview: Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams
Direct routing for enterprise voice telephony within Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams with Direct Routing
Episode 4 – Direct routing in Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Tech Community Discussions:
“Teams On Air: Ep. 65 Direct Routing for enterprise voice in Microsoft Teams”
In this week’s episode of Teams On Air host, Delanda Coleman, brings on Sr. Program Manager, Nikolay Muravlyannikov, to discuss the new Direct Routing capability in Microsoft Teams. Nikolay goes into detail about what Direct Routing is and how bring enterprise communications into Teams with your existing SIP trunks, certified Session Border Controls, and the Phone System in Office 365. [Read More]
“Direct Routing (Screenshots)”
Public Preview of Microsoft Direct Routing becomes available in June. Here are some screenshots.
It’s clear that there will be a migration process/workflow to migrate users currently homed in CCE (SFB Online) and SFB On-Prem to Microsoft Teams when the Direct Routing becomes public preview in June/July. [Read More]
