MS-700 Managing Microsoft Teams – Manage Phone System Part 1

1. Understanding Resource Accounts

What exactly are resource accounts and how do they relate to Teams? Well first off resource accounts are nothing new. We have had resource accounts in the different services in Microsoft for quite a while. I guess one of the most common instances you’ll see this in is Microsoft Exchange when we use resource accounts to represent things like conference rooms, rooms and equipment and things like that. A resource account is actually an account that is disabled in Azure ad. So it gets created, it gets disabled. It’s not something somebody logs on to but it is something that some of your different services in the Microsoft 365 world can utilize for different reasons. Now as far as teams goes there are two main purposes that you’re going to utilize a resource account for.

One being with your phone system you’ll have what’s called a call queue as well as an auto attendant. Okay? And you’re going to have to have at least one associated resource account for this. All right? So let’s talk more about the difference between call queues and attendant and all that. The auto attendant. So first off, what exactly do call queues do for us? So call queues are what’s going to deal with the greeting messages when people call in and there’s a greeting message for the company or music is playing when they get put on hold. It also is something that’s going to help when it comes to a redirection. So maybe you call in, you speak to somebody, a call agent operator and then you get redirected.

So the redirection can happen to a male enabled distribution list or security group. And then the other thing that you can do with call queues in teams is through the Teams Admin center you can actually go in and you can configure some of the different parameters, the queue, maximum size, the time out, how the call handling is going to work. And then another thing you get with this is shared voicemail. So for callers they want to call in and maybe they can leave a message for the organization. This is great too. And it may be a situation where it’s after hours, maybe business hours are over. Somebody calls in and basically says okay well I can’t talk to anybody, I’ll just leave a message. So that’s another thing you’re going to get out of this.

All right? So what’s an auto attendant? So your auto attendant is a feature that is going to let you have your corporate or like informational greetings. Somebody calls in and if you’ve ever been through the please check out the following options press one to speak to the operator, press two to so on and so forth. It’s that sort of thing. All right? So you can customize your menus. You have more features with this that you can actually specify. So you can support things like directory searches. So if they want to search for a particular extension number they can you can enable someone who calls in to maybe reach or leave a message for a specific person in the organization instead of just the organization as a whole. And then another thing too is it can support multiple languages so a person could enter a number and it could utilize another language.

It also supports text to speech and speech recognition features as well. Another thing the auto attendant can deal with is holidays and more of the business hour situation if you need to. You can customize things a little bit more with it. You can have calls transferred to an operator, another user, another call queue, another auto attendant. So you have different auto attendants for different purposes if you want, all right. And another thing would be shared voicemail. So callers call in, they could leave a message for the organization with shared voicemail on this as well. Okay. So one more thing I want to mention here with your resource groups. In some cases you’re going to have to assign a number to it.

Not all resource I’m sorry, resource accounts, not all resource accounts have to have a number. Some do, some don’t. It really depends. If you look at this graphic here you’ll notice that we have resource account one and it does have a 1800 number associated with it with phone system. It has a virtual user license assigned to it. And then somebody calls in, they get auto attendant number one in this case, all right? And that’s going to be your main auto attendant. And then maybe you have a resource account too. As you can see there, that’s assigned to auto attendant too. It’s a nested. Auto attendant. Okay. And notice that you’re not necessarily signing a specific number to that one.

Now with resource account three, somebody’s calling in, maybe this involves sales, right? They have an 800 number directly for the sales team and so you would have a number assigned there, right? And then you have resource account four, which is a Nested auto Attendant, all right. And this is going to be sort of a child to that, right? And then finally the last one is resource account five. So resource count four does not get a number because it’s just a Nested auto attendant, all right? And then you have resource count five which does get a phone number. So again, this is one of those things where somebody calls in and if you’re trying to reach our sales team, dial one.

If you’re trying to communicate with our customer service, dial two. So somebody puts that in, they hit the number, they go to another resource account and away we go. Or you can have numbers that are defined directly for that. So it’s so if somebody to call the main number and dial one for the sales team instead, if they know the sales number, they can just dial that directly and they go straight to the sales people, right? That’s the idea here. So this is what you’re getting out of resource account number assignment again. Some resource accounts are going to need a number. Some are not. And you’re going to assign a number to that resource account pretty much just like you do a user.

2. Creating Resource Accounts

Okay, so let’s start by creating a resource account. We’re going to start from the beginning here. We’re on Portal. Microsoft. com. We’re going to go to the Teams Admin Center by clicking it right here on the left. Doesn’t show up, just click Show. All right. Once we’re in the Teams Admin Center, we’re going to go down to orgwide settings and you will see where it says Resource Accounts. So you’ll notice we don’t have a resource account. And we’re just going to go here and click Add. Now I’m going to specify a name, specify a username for it. And then here’s the resource account type. So I want to do Auto Attendant or I want to do a call queue. I can. All right, so let’s go here.

We’ll create auto attendant. I’m just going to call it test auto attendant. That’s going to be the name of the account that’s going to be my username and I’m going to hit Save, all right? And as you can see it doesn’t take too long to save one and create another one as well. We’re going to go here and click Add this time let’s go and choose Call Queue. So I’m going to say test. We’ll say CQ. All right. And that’ll be our username as well for this. And we’ll hit save. All right. So very easy to create those accounts. Once they’re created. You’re also going to notice that they will show up over as a user because this is an actual user. So if I go to portal Microsoft. com for example, and drop down users, active users, you’ll see that the users are going to show up here as well. All right. Sometimes they do take a moment to appear. There’s the test CQ. Right, so our accounts are now officially created and Test Auto Attendant, test CQ, our accounts are created and we’re ready to go. Okay?

3. Call Queue Configuration

Okay, let’s take a look now at call queues. So we’re here in the Teams Admin center. We’re going to go over here to the left and drop down where it says Voice. And you’ll see right here where it says call queues. So we’re going to click on that, and this is where we would add call queues. So we’re going to click add on that. We give it a name, is going to call it Test CQ. All right? And then since I haven’t added a resource account yet, so let’s do that. We created a resource account already and we’re going to choose the Test CQ. One that we add, we’re going to add that one. We’re going to hit Add, and there we go. From there we choose our language. All right, so I’m going to go here with English. United States you can specify greeting. You can say no greeting. You can play an audio file.

So if you have an audio file available, you can do that sports, MP3, Wave, WMA, you can do play default music, or you can upload your own music. Same kind of deal, same kind of audio formats. So as far as call answering goes, you can add users that are going to be called call agents and they’ll be associated with the call queue. Okay, you can also just do a group if you want, so you can add a group. You can sport conference mode. By default, conference mode is off. So conference mode, if you’ve got multiple queues and you turn on conference mode on those multiple queues, somebody calls in and it’ll go to any of the queues that you assign. All right, so this is turned off by default, but I could turn that on if I wanted. You’ve got your routing method.

So how an attendant gets routed to the first one you have here is attendant routing, and they tell you that when this is turned on, the first call in the queue will ring all of the call agents at the same time. Basically, the first person that picks up gets it. You have cereal. This is going to do a one by one call. You have Round Robin, which is going to go in a circular format. So if you had three agents, for example, it would go to the first agent, and the next call would go to the second agent. The next call will go to the third agent. Then it would start back over on the first agent. And then you’ve got longest idle. So Longest Idol makes it where whoever is idle the longest, who hasn’t taken a call for the longest, it’s going to route the call to them. You’ve also got presence based routing.

So this is turned off by default. Essentially. If you turn that on though, this makes it where your agents can specify that they’re available. Basically their presence is there. They’re online and ready to accept calls if they’ve stepped away and they become idle, then it’s no longer going to receive a call. Now this is turned off by default. So by default, it doesn’t matter if they’ve specified that they’re available, their presence is there or not. If they’re doing stuff, it’s going to call them, right? And then you’ve got agents can also opt out for taking calls if they want. So this is turned on. So by default, an agent can say, hey, I don’t want to take calls, I’m at lunch or whatever. I’ve got a meeting today.

It’s such and such time and so I’m not available. All right. You also have an agent alert time. This is 30 seconds. So agents going to get alerted within 30 seconds. By default, you’ve got call overflow handling. By default, it’s going to do a maximum of 50. They’ll tell you you can choose up to 200 if you want, and at that point, the by default user is just going to get disconnected when it reaches that. Or you could have it redirected. That’s very frustrating when that’s happened. I would rather be redirected. I know for me, when I’ve done this before, I’ve been on the phone and disconnected after 1520 minutes of hold time without any reason. That makes me mad. So personally, I’m a big fan of this option here. Redirect this call too, and then you can specify who it’s going to go to.

Okay. And lastly, you have a call timeout as well, actually, for this, this is for the maximum, not minutes. Sorry if I didn’t clarify that. This is for the maximum amount of calls. This is hold time. So this is more along the lines of where I’m going with this, on being on hold for a certain amount of time and then getting disconnected. So I’m a bigger fan of that option. Okay, so anyway, that’s what this call timeout is going to do versus the maximum number of calls. But that is where you’re going to be setting your call queue at. And at that point, all you got to do is click save. Okay?

4. Auto Attendant Configuration

Okay, let’s talk now about the auto attendant. We have our call queue here. Let’s look at auto attendant. We’re still here in the Teams admin center. And we’re going to come over here to the left where it says Auto attendance. We’re going to click on that and then we’re going to click Add. All right? And so at that point we’re going to just going to give it a name. I’m going to say test auto attendant. All right, you could have operator. You’d specify a phone number for an operator and like an external, they tell you this is optional. This is basically going to let you set up a person that’s going to receive this call as an operator. Okay? And then here I can say my time zone. So I’m going to choose Eastern time for me and then language and then click Next.

All right. So when somebody calls in, this is how call flow is going to work. First play greeting message. You can say no greeting, play an audio file, or you can type a message if you want. At that point they tell you right here you can choose this option, enter text. It’ll let you do up to 1000 and it’s basically going to read this message out, right? Then you have the call is routed. It says then route the call. I love how we have this disconnect here. You can say redirect to the call to a person organization or play menu options. So I’m going to go here to menu options.

If you want it to play an audio file here, you can or you can have it do a greeting. So at that point I can say hit one to speak to the operator or something like that. Assign a key. We’ll say one operator. Put in the destination. You can say a person in the organization, a voice app voicemail if you wanted to go to a voicemail or an external phone number. Okay, so you put that in here. You can do directory search. You can set say none for directory search or you can support by name or dial by extension. Okay? So you can support any of those that you want. All right. And then at that point we would click Next and we can do our business hours right here. So you can set your business hours to whatever you want.

All right. And then you can specify holiday calls as well. And it’s kind of the same thing you click out here and you’re going to configure holiday. So when the company goes on a holiday period, when people call in, they’ll hear this information. Okay, we’ll click Next on that. Now as far as people searching for people, finding people in a directory, you can specify what you want to include here. So you can select which users will be included and available in the organization directory. You can say all online users or you can say a custom group if you want. All right. You can also exclude so there may be people that you don’t want people to be able to search for, maybe like the CEO or the executives in the company.

You don’t want them coming up in the phone directory. This is a way to handle that, right? So we’ll click Next on that. Then we got the dial scope. This is where we have to specify a resource group. So we just click Add put in the test group we created here. Test auto attendant. Add that, and we’ve got that added. Now at that point, we can go right here and we can click to submit. And we’ve now officially created our Auto Attendant.