In India, however, because of the local telecom restrictions, the caller must be onsite and egress through where they are located. In the US, where there are no restrictions based on location, calls egress through the employee’s home base office (Redmond, Washington, for example). In the following call examples, Newell illustrates three Microsoft Teams calling scenarios in the United States compared with calls in India with location-based routing in place.
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SBCs are devices that protect and regulate all forms of real-time communication, while SIP trunks are methods of sending voice and other communication services over the web. His group played an essential role in managing all the devices and services to enable LBR, such as session border controllers (SBC), media gateways, and session initiation protocol (SIP) trunks. Jerry Newell, a senior service engineer from the Employee Experience group, was heavily involved in managing the Enterprise Voice Enablement feature (PSTN services) in Skype for Business and Teams for Microsoft worldwide. An India-based user who wants to make calls to a telephone number while on Teams or any platform needs to abide by this telecom restriction.” “This means that only users enabled for Enterprise Voice will be able to make calls to a telephone number. “Without LBR, we wouldn’t have been able to move India users from Skype for Business on-prem to Microsoft Teams who are enabled for Enterprise Voice,” says Priyanka Revuri, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital.
![skype for business known issues skype for business known issues](https://www.windowstechit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/office_365_skype_for_business_compliance_issues.png)
Deploying location-based routing in Microsoft TeamsĪs the name suggests, location-based routing is used to route calls based on an employee’s physical location. With Skype for Business nearing the end of its support for its nearly 4,000 employees across 13 sites in India, the Microsoft Digital group set up the location-based routing (LBR) feature as the solution that would save the day, albeit a complex one. TRAI regulations require phone calls to go through approved routes, whether within India or from India to phone numbers outside the country.
![skype for business known issues skype for business known issues](https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2015/05/skype_for_business_desktop_sharing-100584431-large.jpg)
In India, it’s illegal to bypass the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) provider to reduce call toll charges. It was a shift in mindset with how we operate our Enterprise Voice infrastructure with Microsoft Teams.” “We had to work with the service providers and understand their concerns. “The government has guidelines around hosting telecom services for the service providers,” Tan says. One of the biggest challenges of the migration was convincing India’s local telecom service providers that the shift from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams would comply with India’s telecom regulations, says Chee Ming Tan, a telecom engineer from the Employee Experience group in Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company. While this transition played out smoothly across the globe for the rest of Microsoft, the shift to Microsoft Teams in India had an important hurdle to overcome-meeting India’s strict regulatory requirements. The team was in the process of moving the infrastructure of Enterprise Voice, Microsoft’s cloud-based phone and audio-conferencing system, to the cloud via Microsoft Teams. The June 2021 date for retiring all of Microsoft’s internal Skype for Business on-premises infrastructure was fast approaching.
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The daunting task entailed upgrading Skype for Business enterprise voice-enabled employees in India to Microsoft Teams while also enabling location-based routing-all while maintaining compliance with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). Made more challenging by the outbreak of COVID-19 and by India’s strict telecom regulations, the now-complete shift is the last large group of employees at Microsoft left to move to Microsoft Teams. Location-based routing is helping Microsoft overcome the challenge of finally moving its employees in India from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams.