Teams Meetings in Microsoft Teams Rooms and Audio Conferencing
We are currently evaluating deploying a Microsoft Teams Rooms solution for our meeting spaces.
An important feature to our meetings that would occur in a Teams Room is Audio Conferencing (telephone conference bridge).
Currently, only if the user who creates the scheduled Teams Meeting has an O365 license for Audio Conferencing will the meeting include the dial-in number along with the Join link.
However, assigning an Audio Conferencing license to everyone in our organization is unrealistic and unnecessary.
It would be preferable if the licensing functioned so that the Audio Conferencing license could be assigned to the room account for the Microsoft Teams Rooms, and therefore if a user (without Audio Conferencing license) includes one of these rooms accounts in the Teams Meeting, that the dial-in number would populate in the invitation link. Also, meetings initiated ad-hoc from the Microsoft Teams Rooms hardware would then also include a dial-in number for phone bridge functionality.
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Andy
commented
We have just invested in an HP SRS and got the Microsoft Teams Meeting room licence as a proof of concept for our boardroom. It's all working great apart from this very issue. I don't even know how to get the conference dial in details associated with the room account as the conference ID displays "dynamic" which suggests it could change. I'm struggling to see the benefit of having an audio conferencing capability attached with this licence bundle if you can't enable people to dial in to the room.
The MS docs page below states that if you run SfB Online you only need the MTR SKU to be able to "give the room a phone number and make or receive a calls from the room or join an audio conference using a phone number" but I see no way of being able to do that. Am I missing something in my setup?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/room-systems/skype-room-systems-v2The only workaround I have discovered is to setup our Polycom Trio phone with an individual Teams profile and sign in as the room account. This allows you to then schedule meetings from the phone as the room which attaches dial in details to the meeting invite. However, I won't be leaving that as a permanent configuration as I think it defeats the point of what I'm trying to do with teams meeting rooms i.e facilitate easy setup. I don't want users to have to physically go to the room to schedule a meeting and have to set it up on the phone but remember to start it from the console screen. The one touch meeting start is fantastic and I want to keep that.
Making it possible to send audio conferencing details out when the room was invited would be a huge improvement.
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iKnowTech
commented
This is absolutely needed, and I can't believe I need to come here and even request this. This seems like just a complete oversight or just a completely half backed product SKU What's the point of having an Audio Conference License attached to the "Teams Meeting Room" license, if there is no way for a user to even schedule the use of the Conference Bridge? This seems like it would be easily resolvable. If you schedule a Meeting where the Location is a Room that has a "Teams Meeting Room" license associated with it just have a check box in Outlook and Teams Meeting Room creation dialog that appears and says "Add Teams Meeting Room Audio Conference Details"
I reached out to MSFT support on this, and there recommendation is to have an Admin figure out the Meeting Room's Conference Bridge Settings. Publish those details somewhere that your users can access, and then have them copy and paste the details into their Invites whenever they want to use the Conference Bridge. So if I have a business with 20 conference Rooms, I need to basically build create a internal webpage or something that lists all these details and expect users to remember where to access these details, and hope the copy and paste the correct Bridge info for the Correct Room. Just ridiculous, but it seems like a lot of the Teams stuff is putting the cart before the horse, and just release it and start selling licensing, then we'll go back later and figure out how to actually make this product work in a useful way. Extremely frustrating.