Planning for Hosted Voice Using Lync-to-Phone

Lync Online Plan 3 supports Lync-to-phone, which is the hosted voice solution for Lync Online. Lync-to-phone requires purchase of a calling service from a qualified Office 365 partner, and therefore some planning is required to make PSTN calling available to Lync Online users.

Similar to dial-in conferencing partners for Lync Online, Microsoft also maintains a list of partners that are approved for hosted voice services in the Lync section of the Office 365 Marketplace site, as shown in Figure 28.3. The first step in the planning process is therefore to visit the site, gather information on the available hosted voice providers, and use it to evaluate and determine which service will best meet the voice requirements of the organization.

Figure 28.3. Approved Lync Online hosted voice providers.

The voice partner will also be the provider for 911 service as part of the agreement. If Exchange Online Plan 2 or higher is also purchased, Exchange Unified Messaging can also be used for voice mail, and automatically integrates with the hosted voice platform. The Lync Online administrator can also define Exchange UM auto attendant and subscriber access numbers for use with the hosted voice service.

After a hosted voice provider has been selected and the service has been purchased, a block of DIDs and a routing service are assigned for use with Lync Online. It might also be possible to port existing DIDs to the hosted voice service, and this can be negotiated with the voice partner when the service is provisioned. After the DIDs are provisioned or ported, user accounts are assigned work numbers using the Office 365 portal. After the work numbers are assigned to the user accounts, the appropriate SIP attributes are automatically configured based on these values, enabling hosted voice. Also, if Exchange Online Unified Messaging is licensed and configured, as detailed in the following section, then UM integration is enabled automatically for the user.