Welcome to Microsoft Mechanics.
Coming up on the show
If you're looking to update your PBX system
today we're gonna take a look at the new
Skype for Business Cloud PBX
coming to Office 365 this year
This adds phone calling capability to Skype for Business.
We're going give you an overview and demonstrate
how you can give calling capabilities to your users via cloud PBX
setting up dial-in access for your Skype meetings
and the options you have to integrate with your current infrastructure.
Microsoft Mechanics
We've seen lots of momentum for Skype for Business in the past few months including Skype meeting broadcast
but an important one that's been on the horizon is Cloud PBX. I'm joined by Jamie Stark
from Skype Team welcome. Thanks appreciate being here. So why don't we take a step back what
is, for people who need a PBX, was is a PBX and what's Cloud PBX? Well so first a PBX
your company's phone system its mostly based off of hardware works on premises. Cloud
PBX it's your phone system in the cloud. It's modern and its tightly integrated with
Office 365. Users, they get all the phone capabilities they need. They can make and
manage and receive calls at work at home on the road
using, you know, desk phones and PCs and mobile devices. Plus you get great controls
for IT. Increasing agility and consolidating management comparison to a
traditional phone system. Plus we can also interoperate with your existing
assets or you can subscribe to calling service from Microsoft. This a big deal becuase
now Microsoft basically acts as your phone service right? Yeah absolutely. So
you could buy a calling plan one that's built into Office 365 and uses Cloud
PBX. Now the calling client is available in the US first then we're going to follow-up with some more
countries around the world. So let me show you what this looks like. You know
a first view from IT
So you see I'm logged into my Office 365 admin portal here and I got a bunch of phone
numbers. So first thing to do is grab some new phone numbers and so we want to
make sure that all this is live for you. So Jeremy what state should
we get a phone number from? Let's go to Colorado. Colorado, ok we got a couple
different choices you like Pueblo are you a Grand Junction kind of guy? We'll do
Pueblo
Pueblo, alrighty and so let's get five numbers from Pueblo. So we're going to add those
in and what you'll see is, I get my numbers, I could actually look at them
specifically and I've got 10 minutes left if I want to go and get some more
numbers for this order. For this case it will be just fine.
I click on acquire numbers. What if you already have phone numbers then? Is that
something I can also do? Yeah absolutely. So if you already have phone numbers you can port
them directly from within
this tool as well. You can actually see that right up at the top here. Port
orders under the preview. So now if you look at this list I've got my Pueblo numbers
and they're not assigned to a user. So the next step is to make sure the user
has the ability to make these calls. So I go under my phone users and I see here
that Janet doesn't have a phone number assigned. I click on Janet, click on assigned
number. See that Janet doesn't have a phone number assigned so grab one of those
Pueblo phone numbers and then of course I need to make sure that Janet has a has
a location that is set up for emergency services. I'm just going to use the
default Redmond location here. You can actually have the phone number you know
independent of locations. It's one of the cool things about Cloud PBX. And that's it! Changes
have been saved successfully and so now you look and see Janet's got a phone number
assigned. So Jamie this looks really complicated to do all manually, what if I've got like
10,000 users and I want script it? Yeah, of course we've got PowerShell. Let me show
you what that looks like. So this is just a script that we've got up and running
to show the demo. Obviously this would normally kick off from an HR system, I've
got those parts kinda hard coded up at the top, like what users we need to enable
It looks like we're going to New Orleans users and users are all comma separated with their
email addresses? Exactly. So we scroll down a little bit here. First
thing we do is we see, do we have those phone numbers for those regions in the
inventory? If we don't then we're gonna go search the inventory, grab some new
phone numbers just kinda like what I did in the web console then were going to take those
phone numbers and then just go through loop and apply this to the users. And
there we go
you see these starting to role in. So you see that the phone numbers
that are assigned to these users. So now if flip back to the web console once it completes... when you
well wait, let it finish, you know, there we go.
So we're all good. Let's go back to the web console. So we're back to the web console, hit F5
And here we go, I've refreshed my screen and you see all these folks out in New Orleans
phone numbers
Ok. So there we go. Got them all configured there in addition to Janet's down there that we
did the web console. Do I have to call the phone company or something to confirm these
numbers are there? No, no, this is
is it. We're done. We've got it. You mean I can call Alex? Yeah totally. So
actually I have Alex signed in conveniently enough here in my Skype for Business client
Let me give you Alex's number it's 504-313-3513 rushly provisioned
with PowerShell. So there we go!
Here's the call coming in. There it is, it worked. Alright I'm gonna hang up.
Very cool stuff. So beyond all of this though, what kind of in terms of getting meeting
numbers and phone numbers for my meetings and conferences what's good for
business
yeah absolutely so normally when you have office 365 you get a Skype link
that works when you're on line so we're adding the capability to also how the
phone number associated with your meeting so that way no matter where you
are you're able to get into your meetings even without a computer without
a mobile device access to the meeting via the Internet or via client but this
way you can dial into the phone number to get audio screen sharing and maybe
some of the more advanced features but least you get the audio connection shows
how you can figure that yeah absolutely so again that's here within my office
365 admin console click on the dial-in conferencing settings here all the
different dial-in conferencing numbers that I have configured so I'm just going
to click on the default one here and you could see that got these set up with a
bunch of different languages so this is actually handy for I want to have a
dial-in conferencing
number set up in France I can have the initial problems coming in and French
versus you know this one here in the us- having initially promised coming in
English not mention all the different countries and languages what is the
story on international support yeah that's a great question so we're going
to market in about 15 regions and so this is where you can initially by the
service so in addition to that you can provision dial-in numbers in about 45
different countries and we actually show you how you can figure this with a user
so I go back here to my dial-in users you see here David conveniently enough
does not how they died Woodbridge configured I click on him I'd use
Microsoft as the provider
and then you see all the different dial-in choices for him I'm going to
pick Los Angeles click Save now thats been saved successfully I can go back
and take a look at my dollar conferencing users and there you go
David got his dial-in conferencing settings and so that way when he goes to
create a meeting is going to have both the sky plank and he's gonna have the
dial-in conferencing ability as well as a really great but what if I'm in a
region or not offer in that column planet yeah absolutely there's a
scenario we called on premises PSTN connectivity so here we use Skype for
Business Server software we can act between a customer's existing carrier
their contract in their circuit and office 365 is what it looks like we
Skype for Business Server software to do this connection in this is with a
customer's existing on-premises telephony infrastructure so this could
be their PBX their gateway their session border controller we do that connection
using direct sip which is the thing that we've been doing for years at standard
for us and then between the Skype for Business Server software in the cloud
will use as your express route which is now generally available for office 365
now what is a software look like they actually runs between your PBX in the
cloud
yeah so if you're an existing customer this is just your you're already in
place
Skype for Business Server linked server deployment if you're a new customer you
can download a set of package virtual machines that just implements this
topology in this capability so it's a great updates and Skype for Business
what's next
so obviously want to be able to roll this PSTN calling and PSTN conferencing
service out to more and more regions around the world were to be increasing
the features that you see in cloud PBX 04 cases where you have users that have
requirements for automatic call distribution and more sophisticated
phone capabilities one of the great things though is that because this is
delivered out of the cloud all of this comes down just into your tenants you
can just take advantage of it directly through the great so really huge updates
if you're on a PBX now looking update that or just add Skype for Business
numbers in your meetings really good stuff coming of course all this news and
more can be followed on the office fraud
or catches wind of Microsoft mechanics thank you for watching and goodbye for
now