##SMS Coming to Microsoft Teams Phone. Does anyone even use SMS anymore? SMS is expected to be available for tenants by the end of February 2025 according to the Message Center alert. This feature will allow users to send and receive SMS messages natively in their Teams client. Importantly, this is via Windows Desktop, Teams for Mac Desktop, and Teams for iOS and Android. This is great because we are seeing features released across many ways people use Teams at the same time.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center is standalone and full of Copilot! Earlier this month Microsoft announced Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center. This product is boasting to be a Copilot-first cloud Contact Center. Whenever I previously spoke about the Contact Center capabilities Dynamics 365 Contact Center had one of the stumbling blocks was always, “We aren’t on Dynamics 365 today, and don’t want to move CRM”. So, I believe the biggest announcement to come from this is the fact that this product with be STANDALONE.

Managing membership of Call Queues without access to the Teams Admin Center To be able to manage the membership of certain Call Queues a Teams Administrator is required to login to the Teams Admin Center and find the corresponding Call Queue and change the “Call Answering” section to input/remove the desired user. However, this can put constraints on your Teams Administrator is doing this multiple times a day/week. This method brings in potential miscommunication, time delays, and additional resource effort.

Teams Administrators can’t create Resource Accounts anymore? In the middle of April Microsoft pushed a message center notification stating that the following Teams administrator roles will no longer be able to create Teams Phone Resource Accounts: Teams Administrator Teams Communications Administrator Teams Telephony Administrator (this is a new role!) Resource Accounts are required when creating Auto Attendants, Call Queues, and even used in the creation of Teams certified Contact Center applications.

UI Improvements coming to Teams Phone Enterprise Connect 2024 also announced some Teams Phone device UI improvements! These are quality of life improvements that I believe will greatly increase the useability of Teams Phone on devices. A quick overview of these upcoming UI improvements are: New call handling capabilities – Call Forwarding from home screen, send incoming calls to voicemail, call of behalf of queue, quicker call transfers Simpler multi-call handling - configure how incoming calls will be routed when on an ongoing call or meeting Advanced contact management – add external number contacts for quick dialling !