migrating the "private line number" feature in onprem sfb to teams

[FlensMan]

Hi,
I think its not uncommon for executive high heads with staff members assigned to them that they have the joy using an additional unpublished number so they can be reached directly without previously talking to an assistant that puts you call through.

However, this unfortunately seems  to be a an sfb onprem feature only.

Q: Ist there a way do do something similar in Teams? 
We have thought about assigning one-member call queues to these folks, but we don't now how we can hide information about the existence of these "special private numbers".

Anyone?

[#2]

Hi Flens,

Today, there's no native way to do this with Teams. One possible workaround is to create a Call Queue with the private line number, with the exec\manager\etc the only member of the Call Queue. That should ensure that any delegates that are setup for that user are not alerted for an inbound call as all call forwarding (including delegates) should be ignored for Call Queue calls.

More on Call Queue setup here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/create-a-phone-system-call-queue

[#3]

thank you for your advise. Too bad that this feature isn't supported - as you can imagine, the "private numbers" are not meant to be publically available or published. So I'd say a Call Queue is not a good option. :)

[#4]

No need to advertise call queue numbers if you don’t want to. Calls to these numbers will appear in analytics however (as opposed to private line numbers that didn’t)

[#5]

ok, now I am curious... how do I prevent that the number can be found in Teams?

[#6]

Hi @FlensMan,

Call Queues are not searchable within Teams (as least, no way that I'm aware of). A quick test in my tenant confirms that I am unable to search for resource accounts associated with Call Queues.

You'll want to create a new Resource Account for a Call Queue:

New-CsOnlineApplicationInstance -UserPrincipalName ra.cq.description@domain.com -ApplicationId "11cd3e2e-fccb-42ad-ad00-878b93575e07" -DisplayName "Description"

License the resource account from the Teams Admin Portal - give it "Microsoft Teams Phone Standard - Virtual User (a free license used for Auto Attendant and Call Queue resource accounts that are to be configured with a PSTN number). Example:

Give it a phone number (via PowerShell example here as I'm using Direct Routing to access PSTN network):

Set-CsOnlineApplicationInstance -Identity ra.cq.description@domain.com -OnpremPhoneNumber +XXXXXXXXXXX

Configure Call Queue from Teams Admin Centre, associate the Resource Account above and add exec\manager\whoever as the only member.

Before going live, test for yourself to make sure number cannot be found, but I don't see how it could be. The Resource Accounts don't have mailboxes, shouldn't appear in GAL etc.

[#7]

Hi everyone,

So you're saying that unlike Skype for Business you can't list the equivalent of response groups (Teams Auto Attendant) with Teams? In SfB I search with the keyword RGS to see all the response groups.

I need to use a powershell script to hide Response Groups when necessary. Otherwise the name is visible with SfB client.

# Hiding a Response Group in Skype for Business
Get-ADObject -SearchBase "CN=Application Contacts,CN=RTC Service,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=xxx,DC=yyyyy" -Filter {msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress -eq "sip:Email address removed"} | Set-AdObject -replace @{msExchHideFromAddressLists=$true}
# then
Update-CsUserDatabase
Update-CsAddressBook

Question : is there a powershell command to hide groups in Teams ? Or is it impossible to list existing groups for the end user (so useless to hide them) ?

[#8]

Hi @Serge Malchair,

There is no concept of an application contact for Teams Call Queues, so nothing to "hide". On prem SfB would display any users and contacts that had msRTC-Line attribute populated (we used to take advantage of this if we wanted non-SfB endpoints to be searchable).

[#9]

Hi @dmunified,

Thanks for the reply, our migration will start in a few weeks and any information is interesting. At the moment we only use Teams for chat and meetings.

[#10]

Thank you,
we will perform some tests. However, we are still in hybrid mode.