Technology Musings

  Came across an annoying issue with Poly CCX Teams phones this week, so worth documenting here briefly to save others the same pain. In short: The phones log into Office 365 and MUST have the time accurate to within 5 minutes, otherwise they will not log on. Indeed, if they drift, they will stop working. Out of the box, they will try and get time over NTP from time.windows.com, and fall back to north-america.pool.ntp.org. If you do not have port 123 open to the Internet from the network where the phones will sit, then you can get them to look at an on-prem NTP server, but there is a major gotcha.  You can configure DHCP scope option 42 to point at your on-prem NTP server (usually, in a Windows environment, a local domain controller) however that's not enough - you also need to tell the phone NOT to override this setting: because out of the box, it does . So to get a phone working in such an environment, you may need to follow these steps (assuming you do have Scope Option 42 ...

The other week, I was looking into using Teams as a phone system for a potential small business customer - and spotted a major problem. But it's not a technical one, it's a licensing (or commercial) one: if you're licensed with one of the Small Business Plans (for less than 300 users), you cannot add a Phone System licence. To be able to add a Phone System licence, you need to have at least an 'E3' licence, which really surprised me. I spent a little while trying to tabulate the relevant features of a number of different licence plans, and produced this table to help try to compare and understand the options. Some points: I've not listed every single product and feature, just what I thought the ones which would be most relevant to a small business customer. I've translated the 'features' into actual 'products' to make it easier for techies to understand. All pricing is standard, with no discounts applied, as of July 2019 in GBP...

Back in November 2018, Tom Arbuthnot reported that Microsoft had started to automatically upgrade smaller Office 365 customers from Skype for Business to Teams. My own Office 365 tenant has now had this, so I thought I'd share some screenshots of the process. First warning The first notification came through to the Office 365 admin email address on April 9th: Lots of useful links, all the information is there. The 'See what happens next' takes you to a page on the Fastrack web site . You can select to postpone the automated upgrade, but I wanted to see what happened, so I just 'ignored' the communication! User Communication Received On May 3rd (a week before the scheduled upgrade), all users on the tenant received this message: At this stage, if you look at the Teams Admin portal, you can see that Microsoft have enabled the 'Notify users' setting: This means that the Skype for Business client (desktop and mobile) has a banner at the ...