Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 6 Jul 2023

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From YouTube: Microsoft Teams Phone Number Management on a Budget with SharePoint Lists and Azure Automation

Description

In this 16-minute developer-focused demo Martin Heusser points to the elephant in the room - phone number management in Teams Admin Center is lacking. Here is the in-house alternative you may want to consider. Uses SharePoint Online, Microsoft List (names and numbers), Azure Automation, PowerShell, CLI for Microsoft 365, and Power Automate. 1-click deployment - the Environment.json script’s Runbook delivers the magic in 5-10 minutes. Customization options using Power Automate. Demo adding/removing users and phone numbers.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development Community call recorded on May 25, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Martin Heusser (Houlihan Lokey) | @mozzeph

Community Call Conversation
• aka.ms/May25-Demo2

Supporting materials
• Article - Teams Phone Number Management on a Budget (Part 1) | https://medium.com/@mozzeph/teams-phone-number-management-on-a-budget-e25d53f65caf
• Article - Teams Phone Number Management List Part 2 | https://medium.com/@mozzeph/teams-phone-number-management-list-part-2-b5385e348a3a
• Repo - Teams Phone Automation | https://github.com/mozziemozz/TeamsPhoneAutomation

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/community/home

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I work as a senior Microsoft 365 engineer for Julian Doki. We have our headquarters in LA, but I live in Stefan, which is in Switzerland near Zurich, I'm, also, a very freshly minted Microsoft 36500 Services MVP since February this year. And yes, some of my favorite Technologies- are Azure Microsoft, 365 teams, power, automate, Powershell graph.

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Basically many different Microsoft countries. Today I'm going to talk very quickly about what's the the problem and what LEDs to my solution or how I built that? How do we deploy it? How does it work, etc?

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So the problem or maybe I have to note that I work a lot with Microsoft teams to Stephanie team's phone, and obviously this also involves phone numbers. So the phone number Management in team 7 sector is quite bad. There's no way to manage your direct routing numbers, so you'll you'll only see the ones which are assigned to users, but there is no like complete list or overview over all your number types. Your very limited, search and filter functionality is no way to get.

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For example, all switch numbers Etc and you always need to assign A team's administrator role for users to be able to assign and unassigned numbers from new users or users who left and so on. And of course, there are a couple of third-party providers who provide such number management platforms or tools, but they are usually quite expensive. So I decided to give this a go and try on my own to create the automated solution using what we already have in Microsoft 365..

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For me, that's sometimes kind of a paradox, so it's unbelievable that a certain feature is not available in Microsoft 365 because to me as a user, it's just the most logical thing, but on the other, on the other hand, it's truly amazing what we can build or achieve by leveraging the existing Microsoft Technology stack to build Solutions around a very specific problem: yeah, that's the the solution. So in the end we have a SharePoint online or a Microsoft list.

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It can be accessed through both interfaces um where we have all phone number types, including operator, connect, calling plans, direct routing. It reads all the data from teams Powershell. We can get all the numbers from there, uh except for the direct routine numbers which are unassigned, but all the other ones are there as well. We can retrieve which number is assigned to which user Etc- and this in the end gives us very rich filtering capabilities. So we have multiple columns.

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We can filter by country by color by number type, or is it the user number or a resource account number Etc and, of course everything is automatically updated by an azure runbook when it's all done. So these are the Technologies which I used.

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So we have SharePoint Azure automation, Powershell the awesome, Microsoft 365 CLI developed by the PMP team, which uh helped me quite a lot to achieve my goal to make it fully automated and also power automate flow to just uh format the list a little bit better and I really tried my best or uh yeah to create like a one click or a one script deployment.

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So, instead of that, you have to go or read through a very lengthy blog post and create every resource in Azure portal and do all the clicks yourself I try to make it real simple. So that anyone can just download this this script from from GitHub and hit enter or run and all the dependencies are installed uh automatically. It's all the Powershell modules which are needed, node.js is installed through Wingate and finally, Microsoft 365 CLI is installed through npm, which is the node package manager, and it only takes about five to ten minutes to deploy.

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uh That's until you have your list ready in SharePoint online, there is an environment, the Json file, which is used to just give a few informations about your environment like tenant ID. The group ID, which is the ID of the team where the the SharePoint teams item will be hosted and finally, the the list, so you can give it any name you like, and we also specify a couple of things for Azure where in which resource Group or how the resource Group should be named, the name of the automation account and the location.

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The script runs. What is created in Azure. There are a couple of resources which are deployed I'm, going to show you this right in the portal uh that's didn't make. This makes uh it makes it a little bit easier.

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um So obviously, I don't have time to run through the deployment process in this call, because it's a very short amount of time to do the demo, but it's all pre-deployed with the latest version that's available on GitHub. So you can see we have the resource Group, we do have the automation account and a couple of Chromebooks.

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The reason we have multiple is that, uh basically, uh there is a main run book, which is this one, uh the team's phone number oh real, and then there are some functions which are modularized like connect to graft and connected teams. They are separate functions which are just imported in the main runbook, so they can be edited without having to change the code, and this also means we can reuse them for other scripts as well.

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Also, the teams module it's type custom model, the other ones are default. They are added to any newly created automation account, but teams is imported automatically through the script as well.

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And finally, we have a couple of Rivals, um for example, uh the FC credit which is needed and also created by the script by the and all of our direct routine numbers or storage in variable as well.

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This is the Azure ID, app registration that was created. We can see. We do have a secret here and also all the permissions were added by the script I'm going to show you in a second how that was done and all are already pre-consented final thing. We need to be able to manage Microsoft streams through a service principle is to add the Skype for business administrator role to the service principle. That's also done by The Script.

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So this is the structure of the Repository.

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um There is the environment, Jason and I showed in the presentation and here's the the setup script. So I really wanted to do this uh in a way where you don't have to restart the powerful script. If you don't have the dependencies- and there was like a big hurdle for me at first, because anytime I installed node.js through winget, it was not available in the path arrival, so I had to restart the partial session for it to become available.

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So then, I found a this uh line of code in the internet, which basically reloads the path arrival, which means the script can continue without uh restarting and I hit the same issue with the Microsoft 365 CLI. So when I was trying to do a login with npm Microsoft 365 login, it was not working.

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Then I found out that I could just change it to npx, which lets me use the commands straight away, and here we can see that the app secret, the the app ID or the the app registration is created by the CLI with the secret and that secret is then stored locally in a hashed format. So only my machine and my user account on this particular machine will be able to decrypt. It will decrypt it before it's uploaded to to Azure again in an encrypted variable.

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And here we can see that we also add a service principle for the app registration and that all the uh required cross permissions are added. So just a couple of things to manage teams as well as uh sites manage all, for example, to manage, be able to manage the SharePoint sites with Microsoft growth.

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Let's talk back to the presentation very quickly. Once the script has finished, uh you basically have a production, ready deployment and then the real magic is in the wrong book itself or in the script. If no SharePoint on that list is existing, yet it will create one with the name you defined in the environment. Json. If you already have one, then no new list will be created and it will only be updated and it checks for all the values that need to be updated.

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uh If you have acquired new numbers through Microsoft Store operator connect or whatever they will be added. If you release numbers, they will be removed and it'll even assign uh or try to assign Reserve numbers or on a signed number. So this is kind of a delegation we can give to users which don't have teams administrative access, but they can still assign numbers through that list.

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So let's do a quick demo. I'm gonna show you the list which you have here and what I'm going to do is I'm, going to add a number to user through teams, admin Center, so just to demonstrate that the list also picks up changes which are not done by the script itself, which might be done to another script or to another user. Through teams, admin Center.

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Then I'm going into the preview and I want to change the direct routing number of Wendy roads, so I'm going to search for a non-assigned direct routing number just type in your name here, foreign.

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Then I want to assign a colleague plan number to another user.

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That user is called mic, and one thing to note here is that I'm assigning a Swiss number which starts with plus four one, but that user actually has a wrong usage location in Azure ID. It's set to Germany, so the script will automatically detect had to change the user's usage location based on the prefix of that phone number.

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Also, I want to remove the number from Bobby and I'll create this I want to.

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Change if your numbers we have so we have a CSV here. This is initially used to upload the directory thing, I'm, going to run it locally because of the Azure Chromebook queues. We don't run into any uh Q issues, so that's actually a little bit of time. I will just change this number from zero, nine to nine nine. So that's one removed one added number and there is a simple arrival at the beginning of the script.

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If I set local Tesla to true I can just execute it locally, because there is a switch in here which will just import all the functions from my local structure. Instead of uh so I'm going to run this.

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It does the login to graph to Azure. uh Then you can see it's now trying to remove the number from this user.

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You can see that this user already has a number and it will be replaced with the new number. It detects that it's a direct number, so it will also assign a voice routing policy so that the user can actually make calls in resources.

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There is also a country lookup table which includes prefixes for all the the countries and if you have a need to assign voice policies, you can just add your voice, routing policy name for that specific country here and if you assign a number from that country, the policy will also be drawn from here and then uh the policy can also be assigned, and now it's working on the user mic, which has the wrong usage location. So it will change it in Azure ID, actually in Azure ID.

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It should already be done, but it takes a couple of seconds for Azure ID to sync it over to uh the Microsoft teams user object. So that's changed now to Switzerland. That was changed by the runbook and then it gives me an output um for all the the entries which are updated or need to be updated to the ETC.

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So let's go take a look at the list.

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We can see. Number four Bobby is now on the side. The user profile stays there because it's not possible to delete it via graph there. The slow will remove it later on which is connected to that list. We can see. Number four mic was assigned the number for when it was changed now you saw the flow just. uh It is Magic and uh removed the user profile from from that number, and we should also see the number 99 here which we changed uh here in the direct routing numbers foreign.

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Yeah that I think that pretty much uh covered every case. There is maybe one more case uh where, if a user has uh assignment errors, for example, if the user doesn't have a license, then the status will change to uh assignment error. So you can go into the list filter by assignment errors and manually check them and but there's also more uh output available in uh the Azure runbook output. Yeah.

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Let's go quickly very quickly back to uh the presentation so yeah we can customize this using power automate like the thing I did with the user profile. There is also more information in my tool. Blog articles articles I wrote about this. You can just adjust the Powershell code to anything. You like you can even add additional columns to the list, for example, create a common field for number reservations and that uh column wouldn't get updated by the script.

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If it's not also in the partial code- and you can use uh webhooks and Bots or, for example, if you want users to if they assign a new number or reserve a new number- and you want to them to be able to uh do not wait for the shadow, you can just uh invoke the the round book through to a Web book. So it's pretty cool uh yeah. That's just quick recap, so we have all uh a single view for all of our numbers types.

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uh We have one source of truths for all the numbers uh checkpoint list. We have great search and filter capabilities. We can integrate it into teams.

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uh I can just add the list as a tab here and it's very easily deployed and also quite expensive, because you're only Built for the wrong book uh runtime in minutes per month.

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uh Yeah, that's it back to you saved awesome. Martin, really appreciate that excellent job.