MS Teams Phone - Common Area Phone Configuration

Recently for a deployment there was a requirement to deploy few Teams Phone with Common Area Phone (CAP) configuration. The requirement was peculiar, though there was no direct approach, MSTeams still has the capability and I wanted to share the steps, which may be helpful. 

Requirement:

1. Change the Phone to Common Area Phone

2. User/Directory Search should be disabled

3. Dialing to any other number should be disabled

4. But should be able to dial # 1 or 2 and reach Call Queue and Security Control Room respectively.

Teams Experts would have guessed the implementation steps that I did, but still need your comments/suggestions that may help learning community on a longer run.

So, I went through 4 steps to achieve this. Lets go through each of these.

1. Create a Teams IP Phone Policy:

Teams IP Phone policy governs the signin method and few other basic controls that can be done on the Phone devices. This policy changes as far I know, can only be done through Powershell. 

There are 3 modes of sign-ins possible - UserSignIn, CommonAreaPhoneSignIn and MetingSignIn.

UserSignin- The experience is default and allows the user to have calendar, Directory Search and all functionalities.

CommonAreadPhoneSignIn- The user experience is restricted to Common Area phone, with calendar feature removed. This signin also comes with additional optional feature that can be configured, which is:"SearchOnCommonAreaPhoneMode".

MeetingSignin- The user experience is with meeting/Conferencing mode.

Below is the default Policy:

For our requirement, we created a New TeamsIPPhonepolicy and assigned it to the user accounts that would signin onto these CAPhones.

To create a New Policy:

New-CsTeamsIPPhonePolicy -Identity "CAP-Policy-DisableSearch" -SignInMode CommonAreaPhoneSignIn -SearchOnCommonAreaPhoneMode Disabled

Now we have to assign the policy on the user accounts that logs into the phones:

Lets see how it looks before we apply the policy:

A blank policy means, the default Policy is applied on the user account.

Assign the New Policy:

Grant-CsTeamsIPPhonePolicy -Identity karthickap -PolicyName CAP-Policy-DisableSearch

Output:

This covers the first 2 parts of the requirement to setup a Common area phone and disable Directory Search.

2. Disable Dialing any other Numbers:

To achieve this, in Teams Admin Center(TAC)--> Users--> Manage Users --> Search for the user that signs into the phone that requires CAP.

Once the user information is loaded, click on Voice Tab

Under Outbound Calling, set the Dial-out settings for calling to : "Don't allow"

3. Dial only Number 1 or 2:

A custom DialPlan with normalization rule was created to satisfy this condition.

TAC --> Voice --> Dial plan

Create a new Dial Plan by clicking on "+ Add"

Create New Normalization rules by clicking on "+ Add".

One Normalization rule for each translated number to be achieved.

The number pattern logic can be achieved in many ways, I used the following Translation pattern:

 

The Translated number is just an example and not the same as production. The Normalization Rule 1, lands the call to a Call queue and the Rule 2 lands the call to the Security Control Room. 

Reference:

Get-CsTeamsIPPhonePolicy (SkypeForBusiness) | Microsoft Learn

New-CsTeamsIPPhonePolicy (SkypeForBusiness) | Microsoft Learn

Grant-CsTeamsIPPhonePolicy (SkypeForBusiness) | Microsoft Learn

Note: The below MS article suggests that we can use license to differentiate the user signin as CAP mode. But, as far as the requirement was concerned, account is a normal user account and hence the license type as mentioned in the article wouldn't serve the purpose.

Set Microsoft Teams Android devices user interface - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn

Teams phones needs to be signed out and signed in back in order to get the CAP feature established. However the dialplan and dial-out policy will get updated within 15 minutes and doesnt require any reboot of the phoned.

One issue I noticed on the phone deployment is it takes huge time to replicate, which becomes a new topic of discussion altogether.

-KVoltz

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