Microsoft doesn’t allow you to split your Calling Plan minutes across different tenants.
So, isn’t this article a waste of time?
No!
What if we told you there was a way to get per tenant calling without engineering your own billing system or figuring out a way to split your single telecoms bill across your business units?
Sounds pretty good, right?
Single bill vs per team billing
It’s long been sold that the holy grail of telecoms includes a single bill from one provider. Marketing teams across the world have forever push the unified approach, single vendor, single pane of glass, and single bill as a selling point of not just their product, but the entire market category.
On the face of it, this sounds great. One bill from one company for your phone lines, calls, and software. Microsoft Teams is no exception. In fact, if you use Microsoft Teams Calling Plan, you’re probably a step further into this than anyone else.
You pay a user license fee for Teams, license fee for Teams Phone, and your calls get billed by Microsoft too. There’s no secondary telecoms provider (like an AT&T, Verizon, or BT) sending you a second bill for your call charges on top of your Teams infrastructure licensing.
It should be simple. One bill, right?
Only, the reality inside large companies is that you have multiple tenants in your Teams environment. And multiple teams within those Teams.
Here’s an example you might relate with…
You’ve acquired a new company that also uses Teams. They are a Teams Phone customer and have their own Calling Plan direct via Microsoft – the same as you.
You’re now tasked with managing their Teams Phone environment. If something goes wrong, you get the ticket. When billing queries come in, you’re the point of contact. It’s Teams, after all, right?
Now that you’re all one company, you change the billing details in the new company’s tenant so it matches their new name. The billing address and contact gets updated and the card details of the now-only-company is setup.
So, what happens when you get asked to split up how much company A versus company B is spending on calls? You’re asked to conduct an audit into cost savings and an immediate possibility is to save money on external PSTN calls by setting up more online meetings.
Your only option is to install some third-party tracking software that may or may not be accurate or to manually add every call record to a spreadsheet and come up with a genius formula to split up your thousands of users and assign a business name to them.
This is a pretty extreme example, but it happens more often than you think. Just because you’re all one company now doesn’t mean the billing is straight forward.
So, here’s a solution.
How about a single number that gets shared across tenants?
There are huge benefits of shared calling across multiple Teams tenants. A simpler operational model, consuming your service from a single supplier instead of three or four makes support and service continuity easier to maintain.
Using a single supplier for all your telephony services gives you more buying power to access bigger discounts and more favorable price tiers.
Easier for your administrators to manage your service. They don’t need to maintain multiple services or figure out which service a user needs. This leads to faster provisioning of users, increased business productivity, and simplifying documentation and processes.
As a business, you benefit from less material costs. You don’t need to buy numbers from multiple providers in the same area code just because they’re supplied by different service providers.
Instead, buy one number range from one provider and share that across all your tenants. This means less wastage with unallocated numbers and better value.
Moving users between tenants when their job roles change is easier to complete and allows them to maintain their existing number without you needing to perform number ports between providers as a pre-requisite.
How to get set up with multi-tenant Shared Calling
Multi-tenant shared calling is only available in Teams through Callroute.
Right now, Microsoft and Operator Connect providers are unable to offer multi-tenant calling under a single service.
To begin with, all your users must be licensed for Teams Phone, just like any other calling service.
Then, sign up with Callroute to get your shared calling tenant.
Through our self-service portal you have 2 choices of connecting to the PSTN:
- Using our PSTN services where we are your carrier and service provider
- Use your own service provider e.g. BT, Verizon, AT&T etc.
Using Callroute as your service provider is the quickest way to enable shared calling for multiple Teams tenants.
Our PSTN service is automatically plugged into Callroute so that it is instantly available to use.
You can choose to port your existing numbers to Callroute or purchase numbers directly from us that are provisioned in minutes into your tenant.
Alternatively, you can bring your own carrier/service provider to Callroute. Our BYOC interface connects directly to your existing carrier trunks. This allows you to use your existing services without having to negotiate new contracts or perform number porting.
Which one should you use?
If you’re looking to renew your telephony service, or in the market to otherwise buy new, then choosing Callroute as your service provider makes sense.
You get one provider, one PSTN service, one bill, and one lot of number ranges which you can share out among all your Teams users in your connected Teams tenants. We also have direct connections with the PSTN that give you the best possible voice quality and service uptime.
If you’re locked into an existing contract and can’t exit easily, perhaps you’ve acquired a carrier through your acquisition, you can connect all your carriers to Callroute using BYOC.
This enables you to share your carrier PSTN connections and numbers between all your connected Teams tenants, just like Callroute’s PSTN service.
However, unlike Callroute’s PSTN service, you will still need to manage separate calling bills and multiple number ranges in the same area codes for different providers.
This option is great if you’re planning to consolidate and optimize in the future but want a more simplified management and provisioning solution right now.
Once you’ve chosen your carrier connection method, it’s time to add your numbers.
If you’re using Callroute’s PSTN services, your numbers will be available in the portal automatically without you needing to do anything.
If you’re using BYOC, then you will need to load in your number ranges per carrier. This can be done easily through our user interface or by uploading a CSV.
Once your numbers appear, you can connect Callroute to your Teams tenants using our automated deployment wizard.
Our wizard deploys Teams Direct Routing to each of your tenants without any technical involvement from you. All you need to do is sign in using your Teams Admin account to consent to the API permissions, and we do the rest.
The process takes around 3 minutes.
After this has completed, you’re ready to start making and receiving phone calls using shared calling.
All you need to do is assign a phone number to a user in any tenant (if they haven’t already got one) and the Callroute voice routing policy.
Both actions can be done in the Callroute self-service portal.
Once assigned, you’re ready to go.
👉 Take your next steps with multi-tenant shared calling here.
