Bug in UCDialplans North American Rulesets

I was troubleshooting an issue where people couldn't dial US/CA toll-free numbers in Teams the other day, when using Direct Routing. Initially, the root issue wasn't that easy to solve, due to the lack of a Voice Routing Test Case tester like we have in Skype for Business. Normally, one of the first things I do when troubleshooting issues like this, is to make sure the user is actually ALLOWED to make such phone calls, based on their assigned voice policy. Teams doesn't have an equivalent to the SfB voice route tester. If it did, I would have found it much sooner.

The first thing that I did was look at the user's call history in the Teams Admin Centre. Sure enough, every toll-free call made by the user failed with the below error logged in Teams:

"The destination failed because it doesn't exist"

No information about this error came up in a search. Reviewing logs from the SBC showed the call never got to the SBC. Client logs didn't provide any usable information. Finally, I looked deeper into the applied dialplan. At this point, I saw the problem, and it was me.

Of course, I had applied a ruleset generated by UCDialplans.com. Everybody was automatically assigned the global voice policy, which was set to allow dialing only within the US. This utilizes a feature in UCDialplans.com where you can decide exactly what constitutes a "National" call.

If you're not familiar with the intricacies of the North American dialplan (NANPA), just know that the US, Canada and 26 Caribbean countries share the country code +1.  Each country has its own set of one or more area codes. There is no way to distinguish whether a number is in the US, Canada or a Caribbean country just by looking at it.

UCDialplans.com can configure your National voice policy so that a "National" call can include any number that starts with +1, limit to US/CA or limit it to US OR CA. When creating the ruleset, UCDialplans.com has a drop-down option where you decide what you want to "Treat as National".

If you select "In-Country Only" (which is the default option), UCDialplans.com will create a national voice route that only includes the area codes for the selected country. The current US example is below, which explicitly details every area code in the US, and is derived programmatically from the current list of area codes:

^\+1(?!(900|976))(20[^04]|21[^1]|22[^1267]|23[149]|24[08]|25[12346]|26[0279]|27[0269]|30[^06]|31[^1]|32[0135]|33[^358]|34[0167]|35[12]|36[014]|38[056]|40[^03]|41[^168]|42[345]|43[0245]|44[0235]|46[39]|47[0589]|48[04]|50[^06]|51[^149]|53[0149]|54[01]|55[19]|56[12347]|57[01345]|58[056]|60[^04]|61[^13]|62[03689]|63[016]|64[016]|65[017]|66[01279]|67[018]|68[0124]|70[^059]|71[^01]|72[04567]|73[1247]|74[037]|75[47]|76[02359]|77[^1678]|78[1567]|80[^079]|81[^19]|83[0128]|84[3578]|85[^1235]|86[02345]|87[028]|90[^025]|91[^1]|92[0589]|93[^235]|94[0179]|95[12469]|97[^4567]|98[0459]|281|458|520|828)[2-9]\d{6}

For the US/Canada option, rather than explicitly including every area code, it EXCLUDES Caribbean area codes, which is a much smaller list. Similarly, for US/Canada/Caribbean there is no need to exclude any area code (except premium), so the list is even smaller.

In an effort to reduce route selection time and processing overhead, the National voice policy doesn't explicitly include PSTN usages for local dialing, UNLESS least-cost routing is being used. For the US/Canada and US/Canada/Caribbean route options, toll-free numbers are captured by the route pattern because they're NOT in the exclusion list of Caribbean area codes. Unfortunately, I didn't account for toll-free numbers in the US or Canada Only route options, which means that toll-free numbers can't be dialed if you use the default options.

You could fix this by adding the Local PSTN usage to your voice policies, but that adds unnecessary overhead. A better option is to explicitly include toll-free numbers in the computed route.

^\+1(?!(900|976))(20[^04]|21[^1]|22[^1267]|23[149]|24[08]|25[12346]|26[0279]|27[0269]|30[^06]|31[^1]|32[0135]|33[^358]|34[0167]|35[12]|36[014]|38[056]|40[^03]|41[^168]|42[345]|43[0245]|44[0235]|46[39]|47[0589]|48[04]|50[^06]|51[^149]|53[0149]|54[01]|55[19]|56[12347]|57[01345]|58[056]|60[^04]|61[^13]|62[03689]|63[016]|64[016]|65[017]|66[01279]|67[018]|68[0124]|70[^059]|71[^01]|72[04567]|73[1247]|74[037]|75[47]|76[02359]|77[^1678]|78[1567]|80[^079]|81[^19]|83[0128]|84[3578]|85[^1235]|86[02345]|87[028]|90[^025]|91[^1]|92[0589]|93[^235]|94[0179]|95[12469]|97[^4567]|98[0459]|281|458|520|828|8(00|33|44|55|66|77|88))[2-9]\d{6}

The latest version of UCDialplans.com does this now, but if you've previously applied a UCDialplans.com ruleset using the "In-Country Only" option, you can either manually update your National voice route, or you can run one of the below scripts, which will seek out any US/CA-National voice route and apply the fix. If you use any of the other options, you aren't affected.

How can I tell which option was used?

Easily. The voice route for either of the other options are MUCH smaller in size. If your voice routes look like this, you are not affected.

US/Canada: (?!(24[26]|26[48]|284|345|441|473|649|664|721|[67]58|767|784|8[024]9|86[89]|876|900|976))[2-9]\d\d[2-9]\d{6}

US/Canada/Caribbean: (?!(900|976))[2-9]\d\d[2-9]\d{6}

The Fix is In

The below PS commands will append tollfree prefixes to the problematic voice route. Run whichever is appropriate for your environment, and BACKUP before you run this.

Skype for Business Fix

$Routes = Get-CsVoiceRoute | Where {($_.Identity -eq 'US-National' -or $_.Identity -eq 'CA-National') -and $_.NumberPattern -notlike '*[2-9]\d\d[2-9]\d{6}' -and $_.NumberPattern -notlike '*8(00|33|44|55|66|77|88)*'}; ForEach ($Route in $Routes) {Set-CsVoiceRoute -Identity $Route.Identity -NumberPattern $Route.NumberPattern.replace(")[2-9]\d{6}","|8(00|33|44|55|66|77|88))[2-9]\d{6}")}

Microsoft Teams Fix

$Routes = Get-CsOnlineVoiceRoute | Where {($_.Identity -eq 'US-National' -or $_.Identity -eq 'CA-National') -and $_.NumberPattern -notlike '*[2-9]\d\d[2-9]\d{6}' -and $_.NumberPattern -notlike '*8(00|33|44|55|66|77|88)*'}; ForEach ($Route in $Routes) {Set-CsOnlineVoiceRoute -Identity $Route.Identity -NumberPattern $Route.NumberPattern.replace(")[2-9]\d{6}","|8(00|33|44|55|66|77|88))[2-9]\d{6}")}


My apologies to anyone caught up by this bug. If you see me in the streets, feel free to slap me.

"Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" for MS Teams

One of the most powerful tools in a support professional's arsenal is the tried-tested-and-true method of restarting a computer to resolve strange issues. I can't tell you how many times this fixed the oddest issues over the years. Why does it work? You might as well ask where socks go once placed in the clothes dryer.

I'm excited/sad to report that the same method works in Microsoft Teams to resolve strange issues that defy explanation. I'm not talking about client-side issues. I'm talking about issues at the Office 365 end of things. How does that work when there are no administrator-accessible servers to restart? You simply toggle the relevant setting off and back on again.

We use Direct Routing for our PSTN services, and for the most part it works great. In the past few weeks, I've had some of our users experience strange issues with telephony in Teams.

1. A few users were unable to receive any PSTN calls. Troubleshooting at the SBC would show 487 Request Terminated - Phone number not found.
2. Another user's outbound PSTN calls were showing as Anonymous/Private. There weren't any caller ID policies being applied that would account for the behaviour.

For each of those issues, I verified that things were indeed setup properly in Teams via PowerShell. Get-CsOnlineUser showed that their LineURI and OnpremLineURI settings were correct, and Enterprise Voice was enabled. Get-CsOnlineVoiceUser showed they were all licensed, PSTNConnectivity was OnPremises and their Number was correct.

In short, there was nothing on the Teams side of things that indicated an issue. I decided to try the "Have you turned it off and back on again?" trick, which consisted of:

Set-CsUser -Identity UserID@contoso.com -EnterpriseVoiceEnabled:$FALSE
Set-CsUser -Identity UserID@contoso.com -EnterpriseVoiceEnabled:$TRUE

I waited patiently all of 10 seconds between commands. I then instructed the users to log off and back onto Teams. Lo and behold, in each case, the problem went away.

Yeah, I know. I don't get it either, but whatever...it works.

via GIPHY

The Complete Guide to Using UCDialplans.com for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing

Seasoned veterans of my dusty, long-dormant blog will remember I did a comprehensive post (in 2012! EIGHT YEARS AGO!!!!) on how to use the Lync Optimizer to automatically create dialplans for your Lync deployments. That guide is still useful for every on-prem version of Lync and Skype for Business since then.  I did a similar guide for Skype for Business Online in 2017 (a mere 3 years ago). With all the changes that Teams has brought (Direct Routing, and so much more!), I figure its about time I did an updated guide on how to use UCDialplans.com in Direct Routing scenarios.

Who could forget the 2012 Hoff masterpiece Piranha 3DD? I didn't know this existed until just now. I know what I'm watching tonight!

A Milestone

Another reason why I'm doing this now (February 2020) is because for the first time, the monthly total number of S4BOnline/Teams rulesets generated by UCDialplans.com has surpassed the number of S4B On-prem rulesets. This is an unofficial barometer of which platform is more popular for Enterprise Voice deployments. I could go on about how many S4B On-prem deployments are at a mature state and generally don't require many net-new dialplans compared to Teams where many are just starting to move their voice loads to it, but SEMANTICS! Just look at the chart!

Who should use this guide?

If you're on MS Teams and you are using Teams as your phone system, you'll be using it in one of two modes (or both in some cases):

If you're using Teams Direct Routing (using your own SBCs to provide dialtone), then you should definitely use this guide. It makes the entire process of creating voice routing policies, routes, PSTN usages etc. so much easier. If you are already confused by the above terms, then I HIGHLY recommend you use this tool.

If you're using Microsoft Phone System (where Microsoft is your telephony provider), then I suggest you read my blog post on Tenant Dialplans in Skype for Business Online. It will tell you why UCDialplans.com is still useful when your entire telephony infrastructure is managed by Microsoft. Even though it was written for SfBO, it still applies to Teams.

What can UCDialplans.com do for me?

In a Direct Routing environment, UCDialplans.com will automatically create the following:

• Dialplans with normalization rules appropriate for your country, so users can dial phone numbers as they are accustomed.
• Voice routing policies so you can selectively control who can dial locally, nationally and internationally.
• Voice routes, which determine where calls are routed
• PSTN usages, which are the glue between voice routing policies and voice routes

In a Microsoft Phone System environment, UCDialplans.com will automatically create the following:

• Dialplans with normalization rules appropriate for your country, so users can dial phone numbers as they are accustomed.

What won't UCDialplans.com do for me?

If you're using Direct Routing, the "only" thing UCDialplans.com can't do is setup your SBC infrastructure and configure the link between Teams and your SBC. That has to be done prior to applying a UCDialplans.com script to your environment. Its not a small task, and could take you a while. Don't worry, I'll be here when you're ready. 

To get familiar with what's required, read the excellent documentation on Microsoft's site starting with the Overview, then Plan Direct Routing, followed by Configure Direct Routing, but stop when you get to the section listed Configure Voice Routing. This is the point where UCDialplans.com takes over.

Getting Started

For those using Direct Routing, I'm assuming you've already setup your SBC infrastructure and have paired your SBCs to your Office 365 tenant. UCDialplans.com PowerShell scripts will check for the existence of at least one SBC via Get-CsOnlinePSTNGateway. If one isn't found, then the script will stop after creating a dialplan.

Generate your customized dialplan script

Go to UCDialplans.com and sign in with a Microsoft account. Once validated, you will see the webform for creating your dialplan become visible.

1. Select Microsoft Teams as your gateway type
2. Select the country and city/region where your SBCs are located.
3. Some countries require special prefixes/suffixes for certain phone calls. Enter any prefixes in the provided boxes.
4. If your SBCs are connected to the PSTN via SIP trunk, select SIP Trunk. If you are connected via a legacy T1/E1/analog connection or you are required to send numbers formatted to the local number standards, select T1/E1/ISDN/Analog. NOTE: There is a bug in the Microsoft PS commands used to create outbound translation rules that limits rule length to 50 characters (every other PS command allows 1024 characters). This may have an adverse effect. 
5. If you are connecting to a legacy PBX that requires adding a prefix to external numbers, enter one here. 
6. Add up to 50 internal extension ranges. If it works for your deployment, add every extension range used across your deployment here. You will see why at the Assign internal dialing rules to the local or Global dialplan? question during script execution (see a few sections lower down for details).
7. If you don't like the auto-generated rulename example shown, you can change it here. Note that you can only control what's in the middle of the rulename. The country name and ruletype are fixed.
8. If you don't want to control who can make local/national/international calls, you can select Simple Ruleset. 
9. If the ruleset is for a country where English isn't the first language, you can force English rulenames. It will also remove any non-English standard characters from city/region names and replace them with the English equivalent. 
10. Once you're satisfied with the configuration, press GENERATE RULES

UCDialplans will start whipping its army of trained monkeys and in no time flat, you will have a customized PowerShell script ready for download.

Notice the Donate button? Not many people see this. :)

Click the DOWNLOAD RULESET HERE button, and save the script as a .PS1 somewhere on your system. You will probably have to unblock it to make it usable without prompting. Right-click the file and select Properties. Click Unblock, and then OK.

Backup your existing Teams EV config

If you've already got a functional Teams EV environment, I strongly suggest you backup your EV details, by downloading and running my suite of Teams Backup/Restore scripts. For more details, see this post, or go to Github to download the latest version directly.

Run the script via PowerShell

Open a PowerShell window, navigate to where the script is located and run the script. You might be blocked from running the script due to PowerShell policies. If this is the case, then run the following command from an elevated PowerShell prompt:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

Or you can open your kimono and use Unrestricted in place of RemoteSigned.

Run the script from a PowerShell prompt. If you are not already signed into your Office365 tenant, you will be prompted for credentials. If your admin account is not in the same domain as your tenant (ie. uses an @tenantname.onmicrosoft.com address), then use the -OverrideAdminDomain switch.

You can also use the -PSTNGateway switch to enter the FQDNs of the SBCs you want to use. If using more than one, put them in quotes and separate by commas, like this .\US-Chicago-MSTeams.ps1 -PSTNGateway "GW1.contoso.com, GW2.contoso.com". If you're using Microsoft "Super Trunks", you'll need to use the -PSTNGateway switch because the script won't detect any PSTN gateways installed in your tenant.

When the script starts, you'll be presented with several questions:

Create global or user-level dialplan?

You can either assign the dialplan (which controls how users can dial phone numbers) to everyone by default via the Global dialplan or a user-level dialplan (the default selection). If the majority of your users are in the same location, you can use the Global dialplan, which requires one less step when enabling new users for voice. If you will be creating multiple dialplans, then its probably best to select User. The script will create normalization rules as desired.

Assign internal dialing rules to the local or Global dialplan?

If you entered extension ranges via the UCDialplans UI, you will be prompted with this question. If you say Global, the extension ranges you entered will be added to the Global tenant dialplan. This means that any new dialplans created in the future will add those normalization rules to the top. This takes advantage of an undocumented feature described in this post. If you don't want to take advantage of this, select Local.

Assign PSTN usages to Global Voice Policy?

A voice policy defines exactly what numbers a user can dial. You can use voice policies to allow only certain users to dial internationally, or set common-area phones to only dial local numbers (as examples). If you have a simple deployment where the majority of users will be assigned the same voice policy, you can set this globally by selecting either Local, National, or International. Local means that users will only be able to dial local numbers. National means they can dial any number within the country, and International has no restrictions.  If you do not assign anything at the global level, you will have to manually assign voice policies to all users.

Select primary/secondary PSTN gateway to apply routes

If there is a single PSTN gateway defined, the script will automatically use this for all defined routes. If there is more than one, the script will prompt you for which will be the primary gateway and which will be the secondary (if desired). This question will not be asked if you used the -PSTNGateway switch.

Configure voice policies for least-cost/failover routing

If the script detects the presence of existing voice policies created with UCDialplans, it will ask if you want to leverage least-cost/failover routing for these voice policies. If you say Yes, the script will assign the existing voice policies in a way that will route calls using the cheapest path possible, as well as ensure that calls can still work if the main PSTN gateways are down. See this post for more info (was written for Lync, but still applies to MS Teams)

Final Steps

Once done, you should have a fully functional voice infrastructure in MS Teams. If you didn't use the Global options for the dialplan and/or voice policy, you'll have to assign policies to your users. A simple example is as follows (assumes you're assigning to all EV-enabled users):

Get-CsOnlineUser | Where {$_.TenantDialplan -eq $NULL  -and $_.EnterpriseVoiceEnabled -eq $TRUE} | Grant-CsTenantDialPlan -PolicyName BR-SaoPaulo
Get-CsOnlineUser | Where {$_.VoiceRoutingPolicy -eq $NULL  -and $_.EnterpriseVoiceEnabled -eq $TRUE} | Grant-CsOnlineVoiceRoutingPolicy -PolicyName BR-SaoPaulo-National

It will take some time for these to take effect, and will probably require users to restart Teams at some point.

Oooops! I screwed up!

If you accidentally screw up applying a UCDialplans.com script and want to revert to a "clean" setup, you can run the following commands, which will wipe out all custom dialplans, voice policies etc. Don't run this if you've already got a working system.

Get-CsTenantDialPlan | Remove-CsTenantDialPlan

Get-CsOnlineVoiceRoute | Remove-CsOnlineVoiceRoute

Get-CsOnlineVoiceRoutingPolicy | Remove-CsOnlineVoiceRoutingPolicy

Set-CsOnlinePstnUsage Global -Usage $NULL

$GWList = Get-CsOnlinePSTNGateway

ForEach ($GW in $GWList) { Set-CsOnlinePSTNGateway -Identity $GW.FQDN -OutboundTeamsNumberTranslationRules $NULL -OutboundPSTNNumberTranslationRules $NULL -InboundTeamsNumberTranslationRules $NULL -InboundPSTNNumberTranslationRules $NULL }

Get-CsTeamsTranslationRule | Remove-CsTeamsTranslationRule 

Additional Tips and Tricks

UCDialplans.com scripts can be used for some interesting use-cases. For example, assume you're a company that has a single SIP trunk infrastructure that is homed in a single country. For this example, we'll assume its in Canada. Now also assume that you have some users in other countries such as the UK, that have Canadian numbers assigned to them. Those UK users would normally be forced to dial phone numbers as if they were in Canada, which is not something they would be used to.

In this case, you can generate a UK-based script from UCDialplans.com and run it against your deployment using the -DPOnly switch. This will force the script to only create a dialplan for the UK and it won't create extraneous routes/policies etc. You then assign the resulting UK-based dialplan to your UK users and they can dial numbers as they are accustomed to in the UK.

Migrating SfB Enterprise Voice Configs to MS Teams

I'm flyyyyyyiiiing through the cloud.....get it? Cloud? Teams is in the cloud. Got it? Good.

The UCDialplans.com Winter of Code continues at a torrid pace!

Hot on the heels of the MS Teams EV Backup/Restore scripts is another script that I can't believe someone hasn't already cooked up.

Say that you have a well-oiled Skype for Business Enterprise Voice deployment that you carefully cultivated over the years into a perfectly tuned beast. You're considering migrating to Teams, but aren't terribly enthusiastic about having to recreate all that magic in Teams.

Well, worry no more! I've created a script that will copy all of your Skype for Business Enterprise Voice settings into MS Teams. It will handle the following:

• SfB dialplans into Teams dialplans (along with all normalization rules, of course)
• SfB PSTN usages into Teams PSTN usages
• SfB voice routes into Teams voice routes
• SfB voice policies into Teams voice routing policies
• SfB trunk translation rules into Teams translation rules
• SfB PSTN gateways into Teams PSTN gateways

Most of this is completely automatic, except for the PSTN gateway part. Teams PSTN gateways have to be publicly accessible via FQDN, and that FQDN's domain name has to be registered in the O365 tenant. Chances are pretty good that the SfB PSTN gateways won't conform to those requirements. The script will first look for an existing Teams gateway that matches each SfB gateway. If one isn't found, the user will be prompted to do one of the following:

• match the SfB gateway to an existing Teams gateway with a different FQDN
• create a new Teams gateway with the same FQDN as the SfB gateway (only works if the SfB gateway already meets the Teams FQDN requirements)
• create an entirely new Teams gateway
• don't match the SfB gateway

All this is presented to the user in a straightforward menu. Once all the selections are complete, the selected matches are shown before erasing any existing Teams EV configs and migrating the SfB EV configuration:

The usual trained monkeys will then migrate all the SfB EV settings to Teams, with a few caveats:

• Since Teams doesn't have "sites", site-level SfB dialplans will be converted to user-level dialplans
• Same deal with site-level voice policies
• If there are duplicate translation rules, they will be merged into one, but translation rules with the same name, but different patterns/translations will be changed to include the PSTN gateway name to avoid conflicts.

If all goes well, the script should progress like this:

If you want to see more details around how the secret sauce is made, run the script with the -Verbose switch:

Once complete, your SfB Enterprise Voice config should be completely migrated to Teams. Check things over to be sure. If you elected to create Teams PSTN gateways, you will have to revisit them using Set-CsOnlinePSTNGateway to make sure they're configured correctly. 

Hopefully, this script will help make your transition to Teams that much simpler!

To get the script, go on over to my Github page to get the latest version. If you experience any issues, you can create an bug report through there.

https://github.com/kenlasko/SfBEV2TeamsEV

Backing up and restoring Teams Enterprise Voice configs

In the cloud....get it?

Whenever I made changes to a Skype for Business Enterprise Voice configuration, either via a UCDialplans.com script or manually, I got into the habit of making a backup of the Enterprise Voice configuration. Skype for Business made this easy with an option directly in the UI that allowed you to backup and, more importantly, restore. I've made use of both options on more occasions than I can think of.

In the MS Teams world, there are a few scripts out there that help you backup your Teams Enterprise Voice configuration as part of a larger backup of the entire environment. However, I haven't found one that will let you restore that backup. Now there is!

I've published two PowerShell scripts that allow you to backup and then restore an MS Teams Enterprise Voice configuration in a few minutes. Slide on over to my Github page for the latest version.

https://github.com/kenlasko/BackupRestoreTeamsEV

BackupRestoreTeamsEV

PowerShell scripts that allow you to easily backup and restore your Microsoft Teams Enterprise Voice configuration

Getting Started

Download the scripts onto your local Windows machine where you normally connect to your MS Teams tenant.

Prerequisites

Requires that you have the Office 365 PowerShell module installed, and that you have a Microsoft Teams Enterprise Voice configuration that you are interested in backing up/restoring. You may have to set your execution policy to unrestricted to run this script:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Running a backup

Simply run .\Backup-TeamsEV.ps1 from a PowerShell prompt. If you are not already connected to your Teams tenant, the script will prompt for authentication. If your admin account is not a @tenantname.onmicrosoft.com account, then you should use the -OverrideAdminDomain switch.

Restoring a backup

Run .\Restore-TeamsEV.ps1 with the path to the backup file to restore. If you are not already connected to your Teams tenant, the script will prompt for authentication. If your admin account is not a @tenantname.onmicrosoft.com account, then you should use the -OverrideAdminDomain switch.

By default, the script will clean out any existing config, including dialplans, voice routes, voice routing policies, PSTN usages and translation rules. You can override this behaviour by using the -KeepExisting switch.

Undocumented behaviour with dialplans on MS Teams

Who am I talking to? Eartha Kitt? Sorry, wrong number. I was trying to call my car.

I've been spending a lot of time recently messing around with MS Teams dialplans thanks to the recent release of SBC-specific translation rules. For the most part, the overall structure is the same as with Skype for Business on-prem. Some PowerShell commands are different, but most of what you already know is usable in Teams.

The biggest issue with Teams is that there hasn't been a UI for managing your Teams Enterprise Voice layout. This can be an issue if you are big into Direct Routing.  Thankfully, Microsoft recently made available what is hopefully the first round of UI enhancements to the Teams Admin Center. You can now create and manage dialplans in the UI. Microsoft has dutifully updated their documentation to help people navigate these new features.

However, there are some undocumented features that open up some interesting scenarios. Along with these are some extremely frustrating bugs that you should be aware of.

The Hidden Feature

In Skype for Business on-prem, there is a global dialplan that applies to users when there isn't an appropriate site or user-level dialplan. In the Teams documentation, the tenant Global dialplan serves a similar purpose, but there are additional features outside of what can be done on-prem. 

In Teams, Microsoft has published a series of very simple pre-defined dialplans called service country dialplans that apply to nearly every country in the world. You can see these by running Get-CsDialPlan and Get-CsVoiceNormalizationRule. They do the bare minimum, and don't do any real validation. These dialplans cannot be modified. 

The documentation goes on to say that you can define normalization rules in the tenant global dialplan or any number of tenant user dialplans. If a user tenant dialplan isn't assigned to a user, they will be assigned an effective dialplan of whatever is in the tenant global dialplan and the default service country dialplan for that user. Similarly, if a user is assigned to a tenant user dialplan, their effective dialplan will consist of the contents of the assigned tenant user dialplan along with the user's service country dialplan. The tenant dialplans have higher priority than the service country ones. 

The hidden feature is that if you have defined any normalization rules in the tenant global dialplan, those normalization rules will appear at the top of the list of any new tenant user dialplans created afterwards. This can be very useful in large organizations with many sites, but have a common set of extension dial rules. You simply have to define the rules once in the tenant global dialplan, and they will show up in every new tenant user dialplan created from that point forward. This applies to dialplans created in both PowerShell and the Teams Admin Center.

Unfortunately, there isn't a real link between the tenant global and tenant user dialplans. They are simply copies of the original. If you make a change to the tenant global dialplan, it won't be reflected in all your other dialplans. As with Skype for Business, you're still stuck with using PowerShell to manage bulk changes. Overall, it might make deploying new dialplans just a little bit simpler if you choose to take advantage of this undocumented feature.

The Bugs

Unfortunately, there are also a number of annoying bugs/oversights with the new UI. Some are cosmetic, but some will force you to re-create your dialplan if you accidentally encounter one.

Description Discrepancies

If you've used UCDialplans.com to create your dialplans, you may have noticed that I make extensive use of the Description field to let people know where the rules came along with a copyright notice. I even put in linebreaks to make it readable in the SfB Control Panel UI. These descriptions are rather lengthy and go well beyond 255 characters (sorry, not sorry).

Here are my grievances with the Description field in the MAIN dialplan UI:

1. The Teams admin center dialplan UI doesn't respect the linebreaks and just renders a wall of text.
2. The UI throws an error that you can only have up to 255 characters, when PowerShell allows a much higher number.
3. The UI also throws errors about "invalid characters", such as !@#$%^*()=/\[]{}:;?<>+' Again, PowerShell has no issue with any of these characters.

What makes this even more odd, is that the UI for the individual normalization rules exhibits NONE of these issues. It renders the linebreaks properly, and doesn't complain when the description is longer than 255 characters and includes "special" characters.

The External Dialing Prefix Bug

This is a big bug, and am quite surprised it made it through QA. For a bit of background, you can configure Teams so that users can dial an external access prefix (like 9), before dialing an external number. For users coming from a legacy PBX, this is undoubtedly a boon and doesn't force them to retrain years of muscle memory. It also makes off-hook dialing more reliable. For an extended explanation of this feature, go waaay back to one of my posts from 2011 on the topic. I haven't tested it myself, but the details should still apply to Teams.

Most customers don't bother with this feature, and have been happily creating dialplans in Teams/Skype for Business Online for years via PowerShell without defining an external dialing prefix. However, if you create a new dialplan or edit an existing one in the UI, you will not be able to save your changes unless you set an external dialing prefix.

Also, this seems to have found itself into the PowerShell commands themselves, but not completely. You can create a new dialplan with New-CsTenantDialplan without an external dialing prefix, and you can make changes to an existing dialplan with Set-CsTenantDialplan, but if you try to remove an external dialing prefix via PowerShell by setting it to either $NULL or "", you will be denied.

As long as you don't set a prefix, you should be fine. Don't do what I did and set a prefix in the UI to see what happens, and expect to be able to remove it in PowerShell. This forced me to redo my entire dialplan from scratch. Thankfully, UCDialplans.com took care of that in a minute.

Spelling Mistakes

A minor quibble, but one that will force me to keep a close eye on (boo hoo me). The New/Get/Set-CsOnlinePSTNGateway command has options for setting inbound and outbound translation rules:

• InboundPstnNumberTranslationRules
• InboundTeamsNumberTranslationRules
• OutboundPstnNumberTranslationRules
• OutbundTeamsNumberTranslationRules

Do you see the problem?

Someone's spellcheck didn't work.

Conclusion

I'm trying to get this in front of the right people at Microsoft to get them to fix. Hopefully, this half of my post will have a limited shelf life. Have any of you experienced any of these issues or come across any others? Let me know in the comments.

Useful Teams PowerShell Commands

Back in the day, I compiled a shortish list of Lync/Skype for Business PowerShell commands that did some reasonably useful stuff. With my shift to Teams, I figure now is a good time to start compiling a list of semi-useful PowerShell scripts for Teams. I will add to this list as I think of them.

Getting Started

For now, there are TWO PowerShell modules for Teams-related tasks. Both require at least PowerShell version 5.x (run $PSVersionTable.PSVersion to check):

Skype for Business Online PS Module

The OG. You install it via https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39366. You typically connect to your tenant via some variation of the below:

$s = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential (Get-Credential)
Import-PSSession $s -AllowClobber

Teams PowerShell module

To install, simply run the following in an elevated PowerShell prompt:

Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams -Repository PSGallery      

You then connect to your Teams tenant by running:

Connect-MicrosoftTeams

You will be prompted for admin credentials. Enter those, and you'll be all set!

Count All Teams Users in your Tenant (Teams PS)

There isn't a direct way to count every Teams user across your tenant. However, you can get a list of users in a specific team. Thanks to PowerShell pipelining, you can string multiple commands together to get the desired result.

(Get-Team | Get-TeamUser | Sort-Object User -Unique).Count

If you want to exclude external accounts who you've granted guest access to Teams, modify the command accordingly:

(Get-Team | Get-TeamUser | Where {$_.User -notlike "*#EXT#*"} | Sort-Object User -Unique).Count

You can get a count of all Skype for Business (on-prem) and Teams users, excluding duplicates by running this from a Skype for Business PS prompt:

$SfBUsers = (Get-CsUser).SipAddress -Replace "sip:", "" 

Connect-MicrosoftTeams 

$TeamsUsers = (Get-Team | Get-TeamUser | Where {$_.User -notlike "*#EXT#*"} | Sort-Object User -Unique).User 

$CombinedUsers = $SfBUsers + $TeamsUsers | Sort-Object -Unique

$CombinedUsers.Count

List All Cloud Auto-Attendants and Associated Numbers (Skype PS)

Can't get a list of just the AA phone number from Get-CsAutoAttendant. You have to parse the resource account list for this.

$AAList = Get-CsAutoAttendant
New-Item -Path AAPhoneNum.csv -Value "Name,PhoneNumber`r`n" -Force | Out-Null
ForEach ($AA in $AAList) {
ForEach ($AppInstance in $AA.ApplicationInstances) {
$AAName = $AA.Name
$AppPhoneNum = (Get-CsOnlineApplicationInstance -Identity $AppInstance).PhoneNumber
Write-Host "$AAName  $AppPhoneNum"
Add-Content -Path AAPhoneNum.csv -Value "$AAName,$AppPhoneNum"
}
}

Can You Install an SDN Listener in a SfB CCE Environment?

As part of my job at Nectar Corp, I'm always looking at ways to get call detail information from various Microsoft-based UC telephony components. It's easy to get a wealth of detail from an on-prem deployment of Skype for Business, using either direct access to the SfB monitoring databases (for historical info) or via the Skype for Business SDN dialog listeners (for realtime call data).  As mentioned in my recent blog post, the same cannot be said for Office 365 UC workloads such as SfB Online and Teams.

Nectar has a tool that relies on knowing when a call starts and stops in realtime so we can gather information from various network components as the call is happening. Nectar uses the SfB SDN interface for this realtime info. Since both SfBO and Teams lack ANY sort of call data API, we have to resort to other methods to learn about realtime calls.

A Nectar customer has deployed several Skype for Business Cloud Connector Edition (CCE) instances to provide on-prem PSTN call routing for SfB Online users. CCE is the precursor of Teams Direct Routing, and it does essentially the same thing but in a WAAAAAAY more complex manner. It consists of several pre-packaged VMs running a vastly slimmed down Skype for Business environment.

We were in discussions with the customer to see if there was any way we could get realtime call info from the CCE instances, by installing the Microsoft SDN Dialog Listener on any of the CCE VMs. Nobody seemed to know for certain, so I elected to setup a CCE instance of my own to run some tests. The question I was trying to answer was:

Can you get call data out of a CCE instance using the MS SDN Listener service??? 

TL;DR:  No.

I had built myself a fancy new work PC at home that I figured would be ideal for this test. I put in 32GB of RAM so I could spin up VMs as needed for my tests, and this would be an excellent test OR SO I THOUGHT!

My first hurdle was that I needed a virtual machine host that would host the VMs required for CCE. In other words, I needed to run VMs from within a VM.

Just like the movie, except much more boring.

CCE only supports Windows 2012 R2 as the VM host OS, so I started with that as my VM host for my VMs, but it blocked me from installing the Hyper-V components, since it was already a VM. A bit of research showed that I could use Windows Server 2019, which had no such limitation. I spun up my Hyper-V host VM, gave it 24 GB of RAM, all the processor cores I had, and off I went.

...OR SO I THOUGHT (AGAIN). I ran into issues right off the bat when installing the CCE components, where most of the CCE PowerShell commands were available. Thanks to a workaround from Shawn Harry, I was soon off to the races and installing CCE.

...BUT NO! FOILED AGAIN!!! There are a number of steps to deploy a CCE instance, most of which require running various CCE PowerShell commands. One of these commands performed a hardware check to make sure the Hyper-V host had enough resources to run the required VMs. I was rudely informed that my super-awesome, brand-new workstation PC did not have enough memory, processor cores or disk space to run CCE.

Keanu is sad, and so am I

Time to implement my hacker skilz.

The big red, failure message that PowerShell spit out at me helpfully included the path to the script that did the hardware check:

C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\CloudConnector\Internal\MtCommon.ps1

A quick review of that script, and a few edits to the $logicalProcessorsCount, TotalPhysicalMemory, FreePhysicalMemory, and FreeDiskSize variables and the script was convinced that I had a super-server with 999999999999 MB of memory, diskspace and processor cores.

With a few more tweaks here and there, I was finally able to get a full Skype for Business Cloud Connector Edition instance running in my modest home lab. Since the CCE environment consists of several standard Windows VMs, I was able to login to them and attempt to install the SDN Listener on what I hoped would be possible candidates: the CMS or the Mediation VM.

Neither of those were running as a full front-end server, but I still held out hope. The CMS VM was running the Centralized Logging Service Agent, File Transfer Agent and Master/Replica Replicator Agents. The Mediation VM was running the Centralized Logging Service Agent, Mediation service and Replica Replicator Agents.

I attempted to install the SDN Listener on both those VMs and got the following message:

And there you go. The answer to a question that nobody else was looking for. No, you can't run SDN on any CCE VM role.

Hope you're happy @ucomsgeek.

The Current State of Microsoft Cloud-Based Call Analytics

Microsoft Teams continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and nearly every company who currently runs on-prem Microsoft Skype for Business deployments are investigating the feasibility of moving their UC infrastructure to the cloud.

While moving UC workloads to the cloud eliminates the need for most (if not all) customer-owned server hardware, UC media still must traverse the customer network. Since the network is one of the major causes of poor call quality, customers still require advanced troubleshooting capabilities.

Microsoft does provide some basic call analytics in Office 365, but there is much room for improvement. As such, many 3^rd party vendors (including Nectar, the company I work for) are keen to fill the gaps. Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion and misdirection in the marketplace about what is possible with 3^rd party call analytics in Office 365 UC platforms.

Skype for Business Online

Even though Skype for Business Online is being deprecated in favour of Microsoft Teams, there are still many customers who have not made the transition. As mentioned previously, Microsoft does provide some limited call analytics and reporting capabilities for both SfBO and Teams at no extra cost, but the available tools only show a subset of the available information, presented in limited ways. A dedicated person can customize the tools to meet some of their needs, but this takes time, effort and deep knowledge.

This is the ideal place for other companies to provide additional value. Unfortunately, the only way to access detailed call analytics is to use the Get-CsUserSession PowerShell command (included as part of the Skype forBusiness Online PS Module).

The output of the Get-CsUserSession command provides detailed CDR and quality information for a specified user over a specified timeframe in JSON format. Much of the detail is not available in the existing O365 dashboards. At first blush, this appears to be a fantastic way to import detailed call data into 3^rd party call analytics platforms, but there are some significant limitations:

• The Get-CsUserSession command only returns data for a single user
• No built-in delta mechanism, so no way to return only new/updated information since the last time the command was run
• Data is only available for 30 days

Theoretically, a tool could constantly run the Get-CsUserSession command for every user in the enterprise, but this is not an approach that scales to the enterprise-level.  Nectar looked at this but discarded it after early tests showed inherent scalability issues.

Another approach would be to provide a GUI front-end that simply runs the Get-CsUserSession in the background on demand for a specified user. This avoids any scalability issues and can provide some useful information on a given user’s call quality. However, this approach doesn’t allow for any enterprise-level reporting or trending data, since data for all users is never downloaded.

Microsoft Teams

As mentioned in the previous section, customers have access to a limited portfolio of Teams call analytics tools through their Office 365 subscription. There is room for improvement and vendors are anxious to show value in this area.

At the time of writing, there is absolutely no way to access detailed call analytics about Microsoft Teams calls or conferences. The Get-CsUserSession command discussed in the previous section only returns call data for SfBO calls.  Some Teams PSTN calls may show up in Get-CsUserSession results, but that’s because it appears PSTN calls are routed through SfBO infrastructure. Detailed call data on P2P calls or conferences are not available.

Some vendors provide some great analytics about Teams usage (channel members, activity etc). These analytics are provided through the Office365 Graph API and does not provide any detailed call analytics. Through misunderstanding or miscommunication, some customers end up confusing this point and think they can get the same level of call quality troubleshooting as they currently can from on-prem Skype for Business deployments.

The Future of Microsoft’s Cloud-Based Analytics

Microsoft has not shared any information about when or if they will release an API that will allow vendors to incorporate Teams call data into their existing call analytics platforms. Rest assured that Nectar is keeping a close eye on the situation and will be able to incorporate Office365 call analytics into our call analytics platform as soon as something is available.

In the meantime, if a vendor is promising they can do advanced analytics for Microsoft’s cloud platform, think of this and ask the right questions:

• Exactly what kind of call data can the tool retrieve? (MOS scores, jitter, packet loss etc)
• How does the tool get data from Office365?
• Does the tool provide detailed call quality reports for the entire enterprise?

If you get appropriate answers, then you can make a more informed decision on purchasing a call analytics platform for your cloud-based UC platforms.

This article was also posted on Nectar's website and Telecom Reseller

Run PowerShell Core in Docker on Raspberry Pi

I've recently started playing around with the latest Raspberry Pi 3 B+ along with a PoE HAT, which is an amazing little piece of kit. I've been trying to offload a bunch of workloads that are currently being served by an aging Windows 10 PC whose primary role is a media PC. This very same PC used to run Windows Media Center on Windows XP, before I turned to XBMC/Kodi and then Plex. It's well over a decade old, but still going strong. Although, now that I think of it, the only thing that's probably still original is the case, since I've replaced the motherboard, videocard, disk drives, and power supply over the years.

Since I've worked with Docker in the past (most recently with a failed attempt to move the Skype Optimizer to a Docker container), I thought I'd try running Docker on the Raspberry Pi.

My home networking setup in the basement furnace room. My Raspberry Pi is circled in red.

I've been pretty successful in getting things working efficiently on Docker.  At the time of writing this post, I've got the following Docker containers running on my little Pi:

• Traefik - an easy-to-use reverse proxy solution so that I can access the different container UIs by using https://containername.ucdialplans.com, instead of http://192.168.1.x:somerandomport. It also simplifies certificate management, since I only have to do it once in Traefik with a wildcard cert, rather than on every container.
• Portainer - a GUI for container management, so I don't have to remember specific commands
• Pihole - a DNS blackhole for ads. Blocks ads for all devices on my internal network. Tidbit: its currently blocking almost 50% of my total DNS queries!
• Radarr/Sonarr/Jackett - *cough cough* media management
• Unifi Controller - manages my amazing-how-did-I-live-before-this wifi infrastructure
• NOIP - publishes my ever-changing public IP address to Noip.com.
• PowerShellPi - Runs PowerShell scripts

It was the last one that took me the most work to get going. While there are several published PowerShell Docker containers for Linux, there didn't seem to be any that would work with the ARM processors inside the Raspberry Pi. 

After much trial-and-error (story of my life), I finally managed to build a working Docker image that works with the Raspberry Pi. I used some of the bits from this TechNet blog to get the right commands, but had to make some modifications for it to work on the latest Raspberry Pi version. 

I'm using this base image to build other images that run simple scripts on a schedule. For example, I've got one that checks my public IP, and updates an Azure DNS record when it changes. It does the same thing as the NOIP one, but its something that's fully under my control.

For those who are interested, the base image is available on https://hub.docker.com under kenlasko/powershellpi. The DockerFile used to build this image is shown below (since I haven't figured out how to display it on Docker Hub yet).

# PowerShell on Raspberry Pi

#

# Version 1.0

FROM raspbian/stretch

LABEL maintainer="Ken.Lasko@gmail.com"

RUN sudo apt-get update

# Install libraries necessary for PowerShell

RUN sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y libunwind8 libicu57 libcurl4-openssl-dev cron

# Get the latest released PS module

RUN wget https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v6.0.4/powershell-6.0.4-linux-arm32.tar.gz

# Make PowerShell directory and install PS module

RUN mkdir ~/powershell && tar -xvf ./powershell-6.0.4-linux-arm32.tar.gz -C ~/powershell && sudo ln -s ~/powershell/pwsh /usr/bin/pwsh && sudo ln -s ~/powershell/pwsh /usr/local/bin/powershell

# Remove install files after completion

RUN sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists && rm powershell-6.0.4-linux-arm32.tar.gz

# Install PS modules (Azure auth and DNS modules shown as examples)

#RUN ~/powershell/pwsh -Command Install-Module -Name AzureRM.Profile.Netcore -Force && ~/powershell/pwsh -Command Install-Module -Name AzureRM.Dns.Netcore -Force

My next move is to get a few more Raspberry Pis to create a Docker Swarm to automatically load-balance my containers, just like a wee little datacenter!

This is for you, Pat!