Shared Line Appearance
Users often ask for a boss/admin feature when deploying a Microsoft Teams Phone System. A very common scenario that occurs is when a user (user A) needs to handle and manage calls for another user (user B). For example, starting with some simple tasks like answering calls for user B, dialing out in the name of user B, and coming to advanced scenarios like configuring the call settings of user B.
Most users are surprised that Microsoft Teams has a built-in feature for this scenario.
The shared line appearance or delegate calling feature has existed since the beginning of the Teams Phone System. Microsoft started with some basic features and extended delegate calling with more features and it became very powerful.
This blog will give a brief overview of the feature set for end users and give Teams administrators some information on how to control the feature via Teams Admin Center (TAC), or with PowerShell. I will also describe how Teams administrators can configure delegate calling settings per user from TAC or PowerShell.
Feature Overview and Requirements of Shared Line Appearance
The shared line appearance feature in the Microsoft Teams Phone system is very powerful and offers a rich set of benefits. The simplest call feature is to redirect all calls from user B to user A. User A picks the call and can transfer the call to user B. Also, user A can dial out with the number of user B, and transfer the call to user B. With the latest updates, user A can configure and control the Teams call settings of user B. Also, User A can pick up held calls from user B, or even join an active call of user B.
And user A gets some call insights of user B by seeing user’s B call history, seeing when user B is in a call and who is the remote user.
To use this feature, user B needs just to add new members to the delegation group and assign appropriate permissions (Figure 1).
User A will be informed via Teams Chat about the new role and granted permission (Figure 2). A user can add up to 25 members to a delegation group. And a single user can be a member in up to 25 delegation groups. There is no limit to the number of delegation groups that can be created in a tenant.
By sending a Teams chat message to the delegated user, the whole process is transparent to all involved users and can protect against unwanted call setup scenarios. Users can set up and manage the call delegation group and forwarding settings on their own. A Teams administrator is not required for this.
When user B added user A as delegate, user A will see a new tab in the Teams Calling app and can control the call, if required permission has been granted by user B (Figure 3).
Both users, boss and admin, must be enabled for Teams Phone System. There is no requirement to have a phone number assigned to the admin user. The boss user requires an assigned phone number, and PSTN connectivity via Calling Plan, Operator Connect, or Direct Routing.
Also, the feature is only supported in Teams-Only deployments.
More information about how to set up and use this feature from an end-user perspective can be found here.
Control Delegate Calling from TAC or PowerShell
A Teams administrator can control whether the feature is available to the organization’s Teams users or not. Microsoft provides a parameter ‘Delegation for inbound and outbound calls‘ in the Teams Calling policy and by default the delegate calling feature is enabled.
If a Teams administrator disables this feature, while users still have configured delegation groups, Microsoft recommends removing these call delegation groups via Teams Admin Center to avoid call routing issues.
Of course, a Teams administrator can control and manage call delegation via PowerShell. The following cmdlet shows an overview of all Teams Calling policies and the setting for call delegation:
Get-CsTeamsCallingPolicy | Select-Object Identity,AllowDelegation
To disable the feature in the Global Policy, the admin can use the following cmdlet:
Set-CsTeamsCallingPolicy -Identity Global -AllowDelegation $false
More information about the PowerShell cmdlets can be found here.
Configure Shared Line Appearance for a Teams Phone User
The feature can be set up and managed by the end user. Normally the Teams administrator is not required to set up this feature for the end user. Also, I don’t recommend doing this as an administrator. When an administrator sets up a delegation group for a user, the user can edit this group immediately on their own in the Teams client. And there are no options to prohibit this.
But of course, there might be situations where a Teams administrator needs to setup a call delegation, for example if a user gets suddenly sick. The Teams administrator can configure and manage call delegation in the TAC or by PowerShell (Figure 4).
The PowerShell module allows a Teams administrator to configure and manage the call delegation group of a user. Here is an example of getting the current call settings of a user:
Get-CsUserCallingSettings -Identity klara.sprudel@office365.thorpick.de
This Cmdlet will add a new user to a call delegation group:
New-CsUserCallingDelegate -Identity klara.sprudel@office365.thorpick.de -Delegate 'rainer.zufall@office365.thorpick.de' -MakeCalls $true -ManageSettings $false -ReceiveCalls $true
To edit the permissions of an existing delegate, the Teams administrator can use the following cmdlet:
Set-CsUserCallingDelegate -Identity klara.sprudel@office365.thorpick.de -Delegate 'rainer.zufall@office365.thorpick.de' -MakeCalls $true -ManageSettings $false -ReceiveCalls $false
And the following cmdlet will remove a delegate:
Remove-CsUserCallingDelegate -Identity klara.sprudel@office365.thorpick.de -Delegate 'rainer.zufall@office365.thorpick.de'
More details can be found here:
Things to Consider
Unanswered Call Handling
A very often asked question is how a call is handled when user B forwards all inbound calls via call delegation group to user A and user A is not able to pick up the call. Is the inbound call forwarded to user A’s voicemail or user B’s voicemail?
In this case, Microsoft Teams applies the ‘unanswered call” action of the initial called user, in this case user B. If the unanswered call action is to forward calls to the user’s voicemail, the inbound call to user B will be transferred to user’s B voicemail.
An Assistant has Configured Forwarding
Also often asked is what happens if user B forwards all inbound calls via call delegation group to user A and user A has enabled a direct call forwarding to another Teams user or external phone number. Will the forwarded call of user B also be forwarded because of the forwarding of user A?
Forwarded calls from a delegation group scenario won’t apply the call forwarding setting of user A. In that case, the inbound call from user B will be handled after the defined time out as an ‘unanswered call’ and the corresponding user’s B ‘unanswered call’ action will take place.
Default Unanswered Call Action Not Visible In Teams Admin Center or PowerShell
When working with the TAC or PowerShell and checking the ‘unanswered call’ action, a Teams administrator will detect a strange output for their users if the default ‘unanswered call’ action is still enabled, and the user hasn’t changed it in the past.
In this scenario, the TAC and PowerShell outputs for “unanswered calls” are empty. The image below shows the PowerShell output where the parameter “IsUnansweredEnabled” has no value (Figure 5).
It might confuse the Teams Administrator believing that the user hasn’t configured anything here.
That’s not the case and it is more likely that the user has not applied any change to the default settings. The parameter in TAC or PowerShell will have an output after the user has changed the ‘unanswered call’ action for the first time.
A workaround to get a better overview can be to set the parameter to the default behavior when a Teams user is initially enabled for Teams Phone system:
Set-CsUserCallingSettings -Identity newuser@office365.thorpick.de -IsUnansweredEnabled $True -UnansweredTargetType Voicemail -UnansweredDelay 00:00:20
Conclusion
Shared Line Appearance is a powerful feature of Microsoft Teams Phone System. The feature itself has existed since Microsoft Lync and made the next step with Microsoft Teams by having more features.
There are still some minor features missing, such as defining delayed call distributions to members of the call delegation group, but these are not a deal breaker and, in most organizations, the current feature works well.
It is always a good idea to provide additional user training for the boss/admin scenario. Otherwise, users can become frustrated if no one explains the feature and how it works, and this can become critical when implementing a Teams Phone System at the C-level.
