Orto for Teams, Tech Blog

Emergency Calling With Teams Phone: Why, How, And Who

Mark Vale

In most countries, including the United Kingdom, it is a legal requirement for enterprise phone systems to provide a way for users to call the emergency services.

In the United States of America, the laws go further. Enterprise phone systems must supply the physical location of the user making the call as well as a direct call back number.

Depending on which state your business is in, the location can be anything from campus main entrance to campus building and campus building including floor and sub-office within a few thousand feet.

Locations are supplied automatically by the phone system using the PIDF-LO (Presence Information Data Format – Location Object) SIP header that contains the address and location of the device making the phone call.

Emergency Calling With Teams Phone: Why, How, And Who

In Teams, you create your emergency locations. You start by creating a location and supplying the street address along with the longitude and latitude.

Then, depending on the laws involved you may have to go further and identify areas within that location phones could be located.

This is done by uploading your computer network information like subnets, switch names, port numbers, and wireless access points.

You then combine your locations into an emergency calling policy for each office location and assign that policy to users and devices located within them.

In addition, each phone number must be assigned an emergency location address. This is the default minimum location that number is attached to. Enriched data is passed to the emergency services by the emergency calling policy associated to the device or user.

Dynamic Emergency Calling (Dynamic E-911)

The information in the PIDF-LO header can be changed based on where the user is located.

When they move between offices, their emergency location will update automatically should the network be identified by the Teams location service.

When they’re working away from the office, at home for example, the user will have the option of setting their emergency address directly on the Teams client.

It is important when provisioning users for Teams Phone that they are assigned the correct emergency calling and emergency call routing policies that apply to them.