Microsoft Teams and Call-me Back Changes
phyler
Was tipped off to this from a friend. For a long time, we’ve had the Call-me back feature as part of Teams. Microsoft has stated it would change several times over the past year or so, but it looks like it is finally going to happen:
Customers have been provided a complimentary dial-out capability that will end on November 30, 2019. Beginning December 1, 2019, each Audio Conferencing subscription provides 60 minutes per user per month that can be used to dial out to non-premium numbers in ANY of the Zone A countries as described in this document. Your tenant dial-out minute pool size is based on assigned licenses and not purchased licenses. This benefit is applicable to Audio Conferencing monthly subscription licenses and does not extend to Audio Conferencing pay-per-minute licenses.
You can find out all the details at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/audio-conferencing-subscription-dial-out
Since the change will go into effect on December 1st, 2019, now is the time to start watching your pool minutes. To do this, you need to sign in to the Legacy Portal (Skype for Business Online vs the Modern Portal).
Then go to Reports, then PSTN Minute Pools and you should see something like this (I took this snap from a test tenant that I don’t use for PSTN/Conf hence, nothing used, yours should look different if people are using the Call-me back feature):
From the article:
Email notifications will be sent to all tenant administrators of a given customer when the utilization of the tenant’s dial-out minutes pool has reached 80% and 100%.
This is one of those areas where IT Pro’s need to stay vigilant on what changes are happening and then working with the proper groups to ensure that end users know to try and use Teams with VoIP whenever possible (besides, it’s a better experience than a PSTN call when you have proper bandwidth). I have actually found that the Teams mobile app does a great job keeping my VoIP call going even when switching from wireless to LTE to wireless and back to LTE.
There is a lot of great information in this article such as how to calculate the minutes you get and which countries are included.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably asking yourself, what happens if I run out? Glad you asked, you get to buy Communications Credits. You need to have this setup and the meeting organizer must also be enabled to use them. If not, the outbound call won’t happen.
The other question you may be asking yourself (I know I am) is “what happens if the minute pool is exceeded mid-call and I don’t have Communications Credits configured?” To that, I don’t know. My guess is that the call will continue and the next call-me back attempt will fail if Communications Credits are not setup. That said, it’s just a guess at this point and given that we are still months away from the change, anything that is stated today, could very well change by December 1st. I will add, if you aren’t willing to setup Communications Credits, you probably should just turn off the Call-me back feature. I know I wouldn’t want to have a user call in to the Help Desk to get an answer of “Well, we ran out of minutes and won’t pay for more, that’s why the feature you’ve used all month is now broken”. That’s ultimately a poor user experience. Better than to do without completely in that case.