Turbocharging Teams - Kevin Kieller and Dino Caputo

Turbocharging Teams - Episode 4: Calling in Teams

14 Aug 2020
0

By Kevin Kieller and Dino Caputo

Turbocharging Teams focuses on tips and tricks to help you get the most out of using Microsoft Teams. In this episode, we talk about calling features in Teams including speed dials, contacts, call history and voice mail.

 

 

Microsoft Team transcript Microsoft Stream Generated Automatic Transcript

 

Welcome to another episode of Turbocharging Teams. In this

episode, my name is still Kevin Kieller, and as usual, I'm joined

by my colleague Dino Caputo. Today, we're going to talk about

calling in teams.

Turbocharging Teams

 

Not surprisingly, you would find the calls icon along your left menu bar, as

illustrated by item number one.. Click on that and then.

You get a list of of item speed dial Contacts, history,

voicemail, um, now you only get, uh, the dial a number option

shown as item number 2. If you have a PSTN calling connection

or PSTN calling so that either means that you've signed up a

calling plan with Microsoft or you have direct routing and in

which case if then an item number 2 if you click on dial a

number. Because you have a PSTN calling capabilities, uh, you'll

see as shown in item number 3, up pops a dial pad, so you can

dial any phone number.

 

One of the things that I really like is you see kind of circled there in the blue kind of rectangle it

shows your phone number well, which is nice if you can't

remember your number because like this this number here I

don't. I don't use on a super regular basis, so that's.

Good if somebody says hey, what's your number to call you

back on because they don't have caller ID? Yeah, the other thing

I just want to point out is not that it comes up frequently, but

just like with Skype for business before it and and link,

I believe before that if you had a number like one 800 Flowers.

Um teams is smart enough. If you type that in, it figures out

what the what the numbers are.. So if you don't have to do that

decoding although nicely, it does show the letters

That map to each each number now.

 

You may say, but Kevin I don't have the dial a number,

but and I hear some of you saying that, well, a number 4

shows up a few things. Us few reasons why you may not have

that dial in number. Um, there's a couple of things you may not

actually have have been assigned a team's license with a calling

plan or you haven't been enabled for Enterprise voice or kind of

more technically. If your voice routing policy value isn't

correctly set up, then that that doesn't show up.

 

So um, sometimes sometimes sorry to interrupt, but sometimes it's

just a matter of waiting. So if you have assigned if you've

recently been assigned a license and the features been turned on

it it can take up to 24 hours, especially during the covid

periods where there's lots of heavy duty provisioning going

on, so that might be another.

 

Thing is, just being patient and then it'll just. It'll just

appear. That's how that sounds like. The general advice, like

if something's not working, unplug it, wait 10 minutes and

plug just so Dino MVP says if it doesn't show up, just be patient

so that the patient what you're saying. 24 hours is up too, so

don't wait like 3 weeks or something. So, I wanted then hand it over to Dino,

who's gonna talk about some of the the different capabilities that you

can use for calling?

Turbocharging Teams

Thanks, Kevin. So we're going to talk about the different options

in the calling application so you can see, as denoted by

number one. When you select the calling application in the left

rail of teams, you've got four different options. Today you've

got speed dial, Contacts, history and voicemail, and I'm

going to. We're going to cover all of them. I'm going to take

the first 2 and then I'll pass it over to Kevin for the last

two, so the first one speed dial really is just. I like to say

that this is really where you can add your favorite Contacts

where you want to be able to dial them quickly. So, and of

course, if you were previously on Skype for business and then

migrated to teams, your Contacts would have all been migrated

over with you. So any Contacts you add in any groups you

created. You can sort of expect to find them in your calls and

your Contacts area here. So if you're used to favourites than

speed dial similar to that so

you can. See, I've got a bunch of speed dial Contacts here. You

can add new speed dials or create new groups from this

setting. So if I speed, dial is really just another group or

collection of. People that you might wanna group together. So

in this case they just named it speed dial again. I would just

view it as a favorite thing.

You can see a bunch of in each of the calling cards you can see

a few options. So for example. Kevin's calling card has a

little camera in a calling icon.

Which means I can do video with. Kevin or I can just do not

initiated audio call from their clicking on the ellipsis gives

you some other options, will get into in the next couple of

slides.

Turbocharging Teams

So we just go to the to the next. Slide please, yes and here you can see we in the top

right we had the add speed dial in new groups and I'm going to

talk about those so.

If you want to add a new speed dial allows you to add an

existing contact from your org.. You can also add public Contacts

here. So I start typing robe for. Roberto and it starts searching

the corporate directory of your organization in teams and you

can see it pulls up Roberto Noda and then I can click on Roberto

and Adam to my speed dial

Contacts now. If you want to get into a little bit of a trick, an

idiosyncrasy with this later.. But if you start typing a name

and it doesn't find it, I'll show you how to public contact

in the later slide. You can also create new groups from here as

well, so if I wanted to create a group called family or Acme

Corporation, I could create a new group and that would that

would denote, you know I could start adding other Contacts to

that group as well, so this allows you for a way to organize

all your Contacts.

Turbocharging Teams

 

So next slide please. And so then we moved to the. Contacts tab and this just shows

all of your Contacts in one big long screen that you can scroll

up and down in in alphabetic

order. And once again, from here it will. It's really pulling

your Contacts from outlook that you've saved in the mailbox that

corresponds to your tier teams account, so you would expect to

find all your Contacts. Here again, you can click on the.

On the phone icon to initiate a phone call, you can add Contacts

from here. Although. Interestingly, when you add a

contact here, it does appear it doesn't sync back to outlook, so

that's a bit odd, so just expect that if you do add Contacts

here, I have yet to see any. Contacts that I've added from

teams sink back to outlook, so that's a bit interesting, but

certainly Contacts that I added outlook do eventually find their

way into this Contacts tab.

So patient have to be 24 hours.. Yeah, well I don't know about 24

hours but they they do show up.. I have waited longer than 24

hours and have yet to see. Contacts go back the other way

so reasonably certain that it's. This is a one way thing.

And once again, we can add an existing contact from your

organization that the search functionality works the same way

as it did.

 

Um, if you wanted to add a public contact, and here's that

little idiosyncrasy I was referring to, so you can see, as

denoted by #3. You know you try to type Fred Thompson and it

says we didn't find any matches and you would expect all there's

nothing more I could do, but if. I click on the we didn't find

any matches then it brings another hidden Easter egg menu

up and it says cancel an ad now.. So I think that's in my opinion

that's something Microsoft can improve on because it's not very

obvious. You would just say OK,. I can add friend from here and

you probably just hit the X and go away. So click on. We didn't

find any matches. It exposes canceling out and then it brings

you to. The add to Contacts option and then you can see

there you can add a full name, accompany a title and a phone

number and then you can finally

add them so. Hopefully that helps somebody out that's in

that's trying to look for a way to contact that's not your

organization. And then I think to the next slide. I believe

that's it for me.

 Turbocharging Teams

One more slide for me as. Contacts calling from your

Contacts menu so. Kind of touched on this a bit. Bringing

up your menu, you've got the ellipsis option. You could just

click on the phone icon.

You can also click on the ellipsis and it brings up the

user, any phone numbers that are listed for the particular user,

and so in this case I have a business number shown. It's 866

number I can add to speed dial from here, which is kind of

cool. So then they appear in your speed dial list which we

just looked at. Or you can block contact and in a previous

episode of turbocharging teams we talked about block. You can

also access this from the history menu. I think Kevin is

going to get into that, so if you had a contact that was

actually in your Contacts list

you can. Sign them and block them from here, which would mean

if they attempted to phone you.

Call would be blocked you. You wouldn't be bothered by it.

With that I'm going to turn it over to Kevin to talk about

history and voicemail.

 Turbocharging Teams

Thanks. Dino, so not surprisingly to see

your call history, uh, you click on history as indicated by

number one. That brings up really a list of calls that

you've either made you see some avamar note denoted as outgoing,

uhm, and then, uh, inbound calls. You can if you Scroll

down a little bit further, look down a little bit further and

red, you see, for example, there's a missed call from some

866 number. Um, if you then, as shown in item number 3 uhm, if

you click on the ellipsis menu, you can call back a particular

person, add them to speed dial.. So yet another place where you

can add them to speed dial. Add them to contact. So if you want

to create a contact based on that number or block which Dino

covered on the other screen as

well.

 

Interestingly enough, and somewhat annoyingly,

you know, if somebody like in one of these missed calls. If

they left you a voicemail, there doesn't appear to be any

indication of that on this particular screen. Uhm, which

doesn't seem great, but.If you think that they've left you a voicemail, um, you can go

to the next screen.

Turbocharging Teams

 

A screen which voicemail, so clicking on voicemail as shown.

Another item number. One brings up a shorter list. You know then,

compared to your missed your call history,

and this is just calls where there was a voicemail and the

first one that I've highlighted this 32 second call here that

showed up on the previous.

Screen as a missed call. But here you see that in fact there

was a 32 second, a voicemail that was left. Now if you click

on the number itself and I show that an item number 3 so the

line with the number is, uhm, you'll get the ability to kind

of playback the voicemail. So this this lower part shows down

and you can play it back at different speeds. You know the

normal speed or 1 1/2 * 2 times

the speed. And then if teams was able to create a transcription,

you'll see the transcript display just like as shown here

and then, either from the ellipsis that's you know,

highlighted on the individual line under the number 2, or if

you click on it and expand the voicemail playback and

transcription that ellipsis there if you click on that, you

get the popup menu shown an item

number 4. Um, so the options you get there is in this list. You

can't tell, but um, items that you voice mails that you haven't

listened to yet. The number is in bold. So if I for example

mark Something as unread, it would go back to being being

bold. So that's when you go to the list. That's how you can

tell which voicemails you've previously listen to. You can

delete the voicemail.. Interestingly enough, I you

know. Tried and certainly on your call history. Uhm, you

can't delete from your call history, so if you're calling

numbers that you don't want people to know you're calling,

don't do it in teams. I guess here as well. You can call

people back, I add them to speed dial, add it to the Contacts or

also block the call directly from this voicemail screen.

Turbocharging Teams

 

And with that that wraps up some hopefully tips and tricks that

help you with making calls and dealing with calls in Microsoft

Teams. As always, we would welcome your feedback and our

contact information is there so you can pass along either

suggestions on topics that we can cover in other episodes, or

if you have any questions about this topic or any of the

previous topics. Thanks for joining us an until

next time, take care.

Thanks, see you later.

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