Tutorial: Audio Conferencing - Microsoft Teams
In this training, we introduce Audio Conferencing in Microsoft Teams—the ability to join a Teams meeting from a regular phone and dial out from a meeting to a phone number. We'll cover the capabilities of Audio Conferencing in Teams in addition to requirements and planning considerations for Teams.
Note
This tutorial includes links to existing content to help connect you with the latest, most up-to-date information. For an optimal learning experience, follow the links to learn and apply. If a link is labeled as “additional information,” you can consider it optional.
This training is for you if you're:
- An IT pro.
- Responsible for planning, deploying, or managing Teams.
- Considering planning, deploying, or managing Audio Conferencing in Teams.
We'll cover the following sections:
- Audio Conferencing requirements
- Planning steps
- Reporting
Audio Conferencing adds features and functionality to meetings in Teams. We recommend that you complete Meetings in Microsoft Teams before this tutorial.
Note
Microsoft Teams is evolving on a regular basis—new features and functionality are added frequently. Please monitor the following resources to stay up-to-date:
- Follow the Teams Blog.
- Read the Teams Roadmap.
- Learn about the latest released features in the Release Notes.
- Participate in the Microsoft Teams technical community to get your feature questions answered.
If you have any questions or feedback about this training, please:
- Post in the comments section at the bottom of the "Next steps" page of this tutorial
To give us product feedback about Teams, such as ideas for new features, please visit the Teams Feedback portal.
Audio Conferencing in Teams
With Audio Conferencing, participants use a regular phone to take part in Teams meetings—either by dialing in to the meeting from their phone or by using dial-out functionality from within the meeting. Review the following resources to learn more about Audio Conferencing:
- Audio Conferencing features (estimated reading time 1 minute)
- 9 tips for meeting with Microsoft Teams (estimated reading time for "#1 - Join a meeting via Audio Conferencing" is 1 minute; more if you read the whole article)
- Audio Conferencing common questions (estimated reading time 7 minutes)
- Dialing out from a meeting so other people can join it (estimated reading time 2 minutes)
Scenario – Audio Conferencing
Garth works at Contoso, a company that has multiple offices. Garth frequently needs to connect with people in other office locations, and because he often works from home or goes out on the road, he's a huge fan of Teams meetings. When Garth sends out a meeting invitation, it automatically adds information for Audio Conferencing. This makes the following scenarios possible:
- Alice wants to attend Garth's meeting but she's on the road and has no access to a reliable network. Therefore, she joins the meeting by using the dial-in coordinates from the meeting invitation. During the dial-in process, she uses her PIN to authenticate, so she's recognized by the system as "Alice."
- Bob, who's currently at a hotel, joins the meeting by using the Teams client on his PC. Unfortunately, the audio quality over the internet connection in the hotel isn't great, So Bob dials out to his own phone number from the meeting to join via the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
- If the meeting participants decide during the call that they want to add users at a different phone number, they can just dial out to the phone number and bring additional people into the meeting.
- Other users can also join from the Teams client on their PC, Mac, or mobile device.
In Teams, meeting organizers can end a meeting for all meeting participants. This is useful in scenarios such as the following:
- Educators can ensure that students don't stay in a meeting unsupervised after a class is finished.
- For meetings that are being recorded, such as webinars, meeting organizers can ensure that the recording ends when the meeting ends.
- Ending a meeting for all participants can help reduce your organization's PSTN usage and billing.
For example, when the meeting is finished, Garth can click End meeting from within the meeting in Teams to end it and remove all participants from it.
Considerations for Skype for Business customers
If you're already using Skype for Business, you'll need to consider the following:
Skype for Business Server–homed users
If you're using Skype for Business Server, Teams meetings scheduled by users who are homed on Skype for Business on-premises will not include PSTN meeting coordinates. If you assigned Audio Conferencing licenses to these users prior to March 1, 2019, you might need to unassign these licenses, wait for 2 hours, and then reassign them for the users to see the PSTN meeting coordinates.
Skype for Business Online–homed users
If users are homed in Skype for Business Online and are already enabled for Audio Conferencing, they'll automatically be enabled for Audio Conferencing in Teams. The PIN they use for authenticating in meetings when they dial in will be the same for Skype for Business and Teams.
Envision Audio Conferencing
The practical guidance covers in detail what's required to plan and successfully implement Audio Conferencing. Review the following articles to understand these technical planning steps:
- Define my success - Audio Conferencing (estimated reading time 11 minutes)
- Make my service decisions - Audio Conferencing (estimated reading time 12 minutes)
- Evaluate my environment (estimated reading time 12 minutes)
- Plan my service management (estimated reading time 5 minutes)
- Plan my users' experience (estimated reading time 5 minutes)
- Document my success plan (estimated reading time 6 minutes)
Onboard Audio Conferencing
Just like envisioning, onboarding is covered in the practical guidance. Review the following articles to understand how to onboard users for Audio Conferencing:
- Prepare my service (estimated reading time 6 minutes)
- Prepare my users (estimated reading time 2 minutes)
- Deploy my service (estimated reading time 3 minutes)
- Audio Conferencing troubleshooting and known issues (estimated reading time for Teams-specific content is 2 minutes)
Exercise – Configure Audio Conferencing
In this exercise, you'll have the chance to test Audio Conferencing in Teams. Although we don't describe how to perform every action, we recommend some scenarios to try out.
Requirements
- An Office 365 organization with appropriate licenses to use Teams
- We strongly recommend that you use a dedicated test tenant.
- If you don't have a test tenant, you can sign up for a trial tenant at Office 365 Enterprise E5 Trial.
- Don't run any tests in your production environment. Changing settings or policies might have a negative impact on all users and might affect their user experience.
- At least two endpoints
- This can be two PCs, but you can also use the client on your mobile phone.
- A phone that can dial in to meetings and be dialed out to
Suggested scenarios to test
- Enable users for Audio Conferencing.
- Set different conference bridge numbers for different users.
- Change the default conference bridge number for the tenant.
- Change settings for the conference bridge number (different languages).
- Change global settings for conference bridges (meeting entry and exit notifications, PIN length, email notifications).
- Observe the email being sent out to users.
- Schedule Teams meetings, and review the meeting invitation.
- Join a meeting from a phone.
- Dial out from a meeting to a phone.
- Use dual-tone multi-frequency controls while in a meeting to mute and unmute a phone.
- End the meeting for all users.
Drive value
From a reporting perspective, you have two areas to look at:
- Usage: How many meetings take place?
- Quality: What is the quality of the meetings?
You should carefully monitor both areas:
- Low usage means that users, for one reason or another, aren't using the product. You can only determine the reasons by investigating further. Reasons can range from the perception that meetings are falling short of user requirements, to a lack of awareness or training, to quality problems.
- Low quality, on the other hand, means that there are issues with connectivity between users and Office 365. Low quality can lead to bad user experience and lower usage. Refer to Microsoft 365 Reports in the Admin Center - Microsoft Teams user activity (estimated reading time 5 minutes) to learn more about the usage reports.
Managing quality is outside of the scope of this training, but see the following training material:
Next steps
We covered the following key learnings in this training:
- Audio Conferencing in Teams
- Requirements for Audio Conferencing
- Reporting
Next steps
- Start using Audio Conferencing in Teams.
- Send us feedback:
- Post in the comments section at the bottom of this page.
- To give us Teams product feedback or to request a new feature, go to the Teams Feedback portal.
- Stay up to date:
- Follow the Teams Blog.
- Read the Teams Roadmap.
- Learn about the latest released features in the Release Notes.
- Explore more training and tutorials.
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