As mentioned previously in my Location Based Routing blog, Teams is evolving quickly and has been “checking the boxes” to be a legitmate PBX contender.   When we left off with Skype for Business, most telephony requirements defined by organizations were being met with Skype for Business, but, just like that, as soon as we got to that point, Teams was the new “gotta have” shiny thing from Microsoft.  Since the inception of CloudPBX with Skype Online, the cloud voice system has been lacking in some of those “must have requirements”, but still I found myself involved in very large deployments moving organizations to CloudPBX.  With that said, however, I was constantly saying; “well, that feature isn’t available….yet”, mainly around Dynamic emergency calling (sorry Microsoft, but your first attempt with static locations, doesn’t count).

Now that Teams is ready for mainstream, I’d like to try and bring a little more clarity to the Dynamic Emergency Calling scenarios within Teams.  But first, there are few tidbits I’d like to point out from the Emergency Calling documentation that make me smile (I know most of my long tenured peers will agree)

• The hated “+”

• The triumphed return of “LIS”

As most are aware, Teams Voice capabilities can be configured in 2 different manners and depending on which you deploy in your environment, will affect how Emergency Calling is configured.  Those types shown here;

1. Calling Plans using Microsoft PSTN Connectivity
2. Direct Routing using your own SIP Trunks/PRI

These 2 options not only handle Dynamic emergency calling differently from one another, but also differently within each solution, depending on geographic location, especially within Calling Plans.  Confused yet?  Lets break down the madness

Reference material is here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/what-are-emergency-locations-addresses-and-call-routing

In a subsequent blog, I’ll be detailing a more in-depth look at configurations.  However, to ensure this blog makes a little more sense when defining the differences between Calling Plans and Direct Routing Emergency Calling, the following items are things that need to be planned for and configured, which are subtly referenced through the blog.

With the parameters defined in the above table, we can now configure Microsoft Teams to define closer to where the user is located within a building.  Those terminologies are defined below:

Calling Plans Dynamic Emergency Calling Solution – Defined

So if you are deploying all Calling Plans, or some locations with Calling Plans, this section is for you.  All the summaries below are solutions that apply ONLY to Calling Plans.  Read carefully.

Emergency Call Enablement – When the emergency location is assigned to a phone number