Categories

The CoreView Teams Voice connector (formerly, Teams Advanced) now provides greater support for Direct Routing numbers. Please note that the features below are only available in CoreView’s new user interface.  


Customers who have purchased "traditional" numbers (i.e., from a telco company) are limited in their ability to integrate them into Teams in any scalable, efficient way. Many organizations are left managing this on spreadsheets, tracking the assignment of numbers to employees, and trying to keep it updated as employees and onboarded and offboarded.  This is an error-prone process and can result in misplaced and unused numbers, employees having direct external numbers who do not need them, etc. It is also then very difficult to correlate reporting on direct routing number usage within Teams with the users who now have those numbers.  


By uploading these numbers to CoreView, customers get the benefit of managing this “number inventory” much more effectively:  


  • reporting features on who is using their numbers 
  • management actions that greatly reduce the risk of errors and increase speed 
  • workflows for onboarding and offboarding procedures 
  • bulk actions to assign/unassign numbers  


Once numbers are uploaded, they can be edited and deleted and otherwise generally treated as inventory to be managed.  


Uploading Direct Routing numbers 


You can upload direct routing numbers into CoreView using the Edit Direct Routing numbers management action. Within that action, CoreView provides a CSV template that you can use to import not only numbers, but details on who the number is currently assigned to. By uploading details on who the number is assigned to you are setting yourself up for an easy crosscheck between what your local source of truth is saying and what Microsoft is seeing. 


This is the list of the fields that can be uploaded: 


  • Phone Number - The phone number itself, the only mandatory field, E.164 format (with the international code preceded by "+" and no spaces, e.g. "+39xxxxxxxxxx") 
  • Extension - The phone number extension, not preceded by any sign or spaces, free text field 
  • Provider - The service provider for the specific number, free text field 
  • NAT/Proxy - In case any of these info needs to be associated to the number, free text field 
  • City - The city associated to the number, free text field 
  • Location Description - The emergency location associated to the number, free text field 
  • Country code - The code for the country associated to the number, the two-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 format 
  • Assigned to on SBC - The UPN of the user the number appears to be assigned to on the legacy master data 
  • Blocked - The state of the number to be uploaded, if TRUE the uploaded number is not considered to be eligible for assigning to users 
  • Description - A general notes field 


Instructions 


  1. Go to Actions > Management actions 
  2. Click “Edit direct routing numbers” 
  3. From within the action wizard, click “Download template” 
  4. Fill in the CSV template with your data 
  5. In the Edit direct routing number action, click “Upload from CSV” 
  6. Select your populated CSV  
  7. The file will be scanned for errors and inconsistencies and will return a list of data that needs to be corrected. The upload cannot proceed until issues have been resolved.  
  8. Once the upload file is free from errors, the numbers will be uploaded and will be visible in the “Phone numbers” report 


You can then see these numbers on the Teams Numbers report and use the “Mismatch between Teams and SBC assignee” field to find data conflicts.  


Editing Direct Routing numbers 


Once the direct routing numbers are uploaded, it is possible to edit their attributes to reflect changes or mistakes that have occurred during the import phase. The only field that is not editable is the number itself. It is possible to block a direct routing number, making it so that it is not considered when selecting numbers to assign. It is also possible to edit the number assignee according to the local data source (ie, the SBC), keeping data aligned between CoreView data sources. 


Instructions 


  1. Go to Actions > Management actions  
  2. Click “Edit direct routing numbers” 
  3. Select the number you want to edit 
  4. Edit the number properties and click Save. 


Once a number is uploaded it is only possible to edit it via the management action. A new CSV upload of the same number will be blocked by the checks in place for data consistency unless the number is deleted first. 


Deleting Direct Routing numbers 


You can delete numbers from CoreView if they are no longer available or were entered incorrectly.  


Instructions 


  1. Go to Actions > Management actions 
  2. Click “Delete direct routing number” 
  3. Select the number you want to delete and click Save 


If the number to be deleted is assigned to a user, the action will return an error prompting the user to unassign the number before deleting it.  


Phone Number Report 


The Phone Number report has been updated to include all plan types: Teams calling plan, operator connect and direct routing numbers. It is also updated so to include additional fields available when uploading direct routing numbers. Other improvements include the update of the import, which allows us to report on direct routing numbers assigned to Teams users. This means that, even if you have not uploaded your direct routing numbers to be used as inventory, you can still report on users who have a direct routing number assigned to them via Teams.  


Assigning & Unassigning Direct Routing numbers  


We have combined the actions for assigning phone numbers, be it a direct routing number you have uploaded, a Teams phone number or an operator connect number. You can only assign numbers to users who have a Teams Voice license.  Other users won’t be displayed as potential targets for the management action. 


Instructions 


  1. Go to Actions > Management actions 
  2. Click “Assign phone number” 
  3. Select the user you want to assign a number to 
  4. Choose the plan type of number you want to assign. The plan selected will determine the filtering on the dropdown list that is then presented to you. It is only possible to select one plan at a time. 
  5. Select a number from the dropdown list. Alternatively, it is possible to activate the toggle “Use the first number starting with certain digits”, and start typing the number you want to assign.  For example, you could type just  country and city code (aka, prefix), and the system will automatically assign the first number matching the criteria. If you have specified a UPN and a location during the upload phase of your direct routing numbers, if there is a unique match you will see them automatically suggested when performing the assign action.
  6. Assign an emergency location and click Save 


We have also introduced a separate management action to unassign a phone number. 


Instructions 


  1. Go to Actions > Management actions 
  2. Select the user(s).
  3. Click “Unassign phone number” 
  4. Select the user that needs their number removed and click Save 


Setting up virtual tenants for numbers 


If you wish to delegate responsibility for managing numbers to delegated administrators, you can create or edit your virtual tenants to include number information.   


If your virtual tenants for users match your number distribution you can simply edit your existing virtual tenants. For example, you break down your virtual tenants by country and you want your numbers distributed by country OR your virtual tenants are organized by department and your numbers will also be distributed to departments. But if they don’t match, you can set up virtual tenants specifically for numbers. For example, you might want your phone numbers distributed by country, but your virtual tenants are broken down by Business Unit.   


You can populate your virtual tenants based on which users are already assigned direct routing numbers. When you upload the list of direct routing numbers, you can identify the user assigned to each number. If there is a conflict between the data provided from the SBC and the data contained within Teams you can see that on the Teams Numbers report. Use the “Mismatch between Teams and SBC assignee” field to find and resolve data conflicts. 


You can have a quick snapshot of the users in your Virtual tenant who have a phone number assigned to them in a dedicated section. Please keep in mind that a user can be a part of multiple Virtual tenants, in that that the user and the number assigned to him will be visible in more than one Virtual tenant. On the other hand I can only distribute spare numbers to one Virtual tenant, this means that, depending on the scenario, the number assigned to a user can be allocated to my Virtual tenant or not. 


You can then distribute the remaining inventory based on criteria with the ability to “cap” the number given to each virtual tenant. For example, you can allocate a virtual tenant 50 numbers from the remaining UK phone number inventory.  


If your virtual tenants for numbers are not the same as your virtual tenants for users, an operator could have responsibility for managing a number but not the user who has the number. In this case, the operator would be able to do the following:   


  • Assign number 
  • Unassign number 
  • View User ID and UPN of the user assigned a number 


If your virtual tenant has no delegation filters for users, the operator will be able to do the following: 


  • Assign number to all users in your tenant 
  • Unassign number from all users in your tenant 
  • View User ID and UPN of every user assigned a number 


If your virtual tenant has delegation filters for users, the operator will be able to do the following: 


If your virtual tenants for numbers are not the same as your virtual tenants for users, an operator could have responsibility for managing a number but not the user who has the number. In this case,  the operator would be able to do the following:     


  • Assign number only to users matching delegation filters in the virtul tenant of which the operator delegated to managing number is assigned. 
  • Unassign number only to users matching delegation filters in the virtul tenant of which the operator delegated to managing number is assigned. 
  • View User ID and UPN of the user assigned a number only to users matching the delegation filters set for users in the Virtual tenant of which the operator delegated to managing number is assigned. This means that if a number which has been allocated to a virtual tenant is assigned, via means different than CoreView, to a user that is outside of the scope of that virtual tenant, the possibility to manage that number is lost until the number is unassigned from the “wrong” user. 


Instructions 


  1. Go to Settings > Virtual Tenants 
  2. Create a new Virtual tenant or access an already existing one 
  3. Go to the Telephony tab 
  4. Optional: Have a quick check to my configuration in the “Overview” tab, here I can see my number allocation rules and the amount of the allocated and consumed numbers in my Virtual tenant. 
  5. Optional: Have a look at the “Consumed” tab to see who of the users assigned to my Virtual tenant has a phone number assigned to them 
  6. Go to the spare numbers tab. Here I can decide criteria by which I want to allocate spare numbers (numbers that are not assigned to anyone or not part of any other Virtual tenant) to my Virtual tenant. I can decide to segregate based on a variety of attributes and, based on the amount of numbers that fit my criteria, decide to allocate all of the results or only a part of them. The filtering is dependent on the number plan type, so I can have different criteria for Teams numbers and direct routing numbers. 
  7. Save and complete the configuration.