{"id":6561,"date":"2021-04-12T02:15:11","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T09:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=6561"},"modified":"2025-09-03T13:43:55","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T20:43:55","slug":"location-based-routing-enables-microsoft-india-move-to-microsoft-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/location-based-routing-enables-microsoft-india-move-to-microsoft-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"Location-based routing enables Microsoft India move to Microsoft Teams"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MicrosoftWe periodically update our stories, but we can’t verify that they represent the full picture of our current situation at Microsoft. We leave them on the site so you can see what our thinking and experience was at the time.<\/em><\/p>\n

Location-based routing helped Microsoft overcome the challenge of finally moving its employees in India from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams.<\/p>\n

Made more challenging by the outbreak of COVID-19 and by India\u2019s strict telecom regulations, the now-complete shift was the last large group of employees left at Microsoft to move to Microsoft Teams.<\/p>\n

The daunting task entailed upgrading Skype for Business enterprise voice-enabled employees in India to Microsoft Teams while also enabling location-based routing\u2014all while maintaining compliance with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).<\/p>\n

Getting regulatory approval<\/h2>\n

The December 2021 date for retiring all of Microsoft\u2019s internal Skype for Business on-premises infrastructure was fast approaching.<\/p>\n

The team was in the process of moving the infrastructure of Enterprise Voice, Microsoft\u2019s cloud-based phone and audio-conferencing system, to the cloud via Microsoft Teams. While this transition played out smoothly across the globe for the rest of Microsoft, the shift to Microsoft Teams in India had an important hurdle to overcome\u2014meeting India\u2019s strict regulatory requirements.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest challenges of the migration was convincing India\u2019s local telecom service providers that the shift from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams would comply with India’s telecom regulations, says Chee Ming Tan, a telecom engineer from the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience group, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company.<\/p>\n

“The government has guidelines around hosting telecom services for the service providers,\u201d Tan says. \u201cWe had to work with the service providers and understand their concerns. It was a shift in mindset with how we operate our Enterprise Voice infrastructure with Microsoft Teams.”<\/p>\n

In India, it\u2019s illegal to bypass the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) provider to reduce call toll charges. TRAI regulations require phone calls to go through approved routes, whether within India or from India to phone numbers outside the country.<\/p>\n

With Skype for Business nearing the end of its support for its nearly 4,000 employees across 13 sites in India, the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience group set up the location-based routing (LBR) feature as the solution that would save the day, albeit a complex one.<\/p>\n

Deploying location-based routing in Microsoft Teams<\/h2>\n

As the name suggests, location-based routing is used to route calls based on an employee’s physical location.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout LBR in Teams, we wouldn\u2019t have been able to move India-based users from Skype for Business on-prem to Microsoft Teams with Enterprise Voice,\u201d says Priyanka Revuri, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. \u201cEnterprise Voice is a feature that allows users to make calls to a telephone number. An India user who wants to make calls to a telephone number while on Teams or any platform has to abide by this telecom restriction, which LBR allows.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jerry Newell, a senior service engineer from the Employee Experience group, was heavily involved in managing the Enterprise Voice Enablement feature (PSTN services) in Skype for Business and Teams for Microsoft worldwide. His group played an essential role in managing all the devices and services to enable LBR, such as session border controllers (SBC), media gateways, and session initiation protocol (SIP) trunks. SBCs are devices that protect and regulate all forms of real-time communication, while SIP trunks are methods of sending voice and other communication services over the web.<\/p>\n

In the following call examples, Newell illustrates three Microsoft Teams calling scenarios in the United States compared with calls in India with location-based routing in place. In the US, where there are no restrictions based on location, calls egress through the employee\u2019s home base office (Redmond, Washington, for example). In India, however, because of the local telecom restrictions, the caller must be onsite and egress through where they are located.<\/p>\n

\"Graphic<\/p>\n

\"Graphic
Making permitted calls in India via Microsoft Teams is now possible thanks to the location-based routing solution that allows Microsoft to comply with telecom regulations in that country.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the left and right scenarios shown for an employee in India, location-based routing enables Vijay to make Microsoft Teams calls to different locations onsite from a Microsoft office. With LBR, an employee\u2019s location must be validated before that employee can make a call. The middle scenario shows that employees are still unable to make Microsoft Teams calls outside of the Microsoft network, because there is no way to validate their location.<\/p>\n

The engineering group encountered a couple of issues with LBR and compliance at the beginning.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe learned that just because the user PC clients on our corpnet network segment were following the India regulations, that doesn\u2019t mean our other Teams object types like a Teams IP phone were,\u201d says Shin Kodaira, a senior service engineer with the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe issue we ran into was that Teams\u2019 IP phone device accounts are supposed to be installed onto our Zero Trust network (ZTN) segment,\u201d he says, adding that the firewall for the network was located outside of India. That meant that moving devices to Microsoft\u2019s ZTN segment would have potentially incurred huge fines for breaking regulations.<\/p>\n

It was a constant review of scripts, compliance, and logic. These efforts included the actual migration, licensing, setting up dates and locations\u2014all to ensure that the migration was successful.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Gerard Nijhuis, service engineer, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The group\u2019s takeaway?<\/p>\n

\u201cAlways check the routing for each object and network type when implementing LBR to ensure that all paths meet the regulations,\u201d Kodaira says.<\/p>\n

Since then, six new sites have been added to comprise a total of 19 sites that successfully use this setup in India.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a constant review of scripts, compliance, and logic,\u201d says Gerard Nijhuis, another Microsoft Digital Employee Experience service engineer who worked on the Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams migration. \u201cThese efforts included the actual migration, licensing, setting up dates and locations\u2014all to ensure that the migration was successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Extending beyond a collaborative approach<\/h2>\n

It goes without saying that the success of the location-based routing implementation in Microsoft Teams can be attributed to the collaborative approach of all the groups involved.<\/p>\n

Revuri is quick to express gratitude to the multiple teams involved in the project.<\/p>\n

\u201cOutside of the service and telecom engineers, we had help from the Extended Service Engineering team to coordinate these efforts,\u201d Revuri says. \u201cThe India IT managers were key in providing feedback on the overall process, as well as helping test the functionalities before continuing to other phases of the migration. They helped us identify our users and connected us directly with them to get their feedback.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along the way, the groups had to network with the product group and managers to get the right people involved.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Microsoft legal department played a big part between us and the local government,\u201d Revuri recalls.<\/p>\n

On top of the engineering teams, the communications and internal Microsoft Helpdesk teams also played key roles in notifying users about the planned feature changes. It was highly crucial, considering that the migration primarily took place during the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe emergence of COVID was definitely a challenge,\u201d says Scott Kovach, the project\u2019s Microsoft Teams service manager for Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. \u201cOne of the requirements we had to fulfill to complete the audit was to deploy an onsite team to meet the telecom company. This delayed the actual approval process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adapting a multitier rollout<\/h2>\n

After many twists and turns, the team was finally ready for a multitier rollout in November 2020.<\/p>\n

The first site that went through the migration was Gurgaon, a city in New Delhi, with 300 employees, followed by Hyderabad with 3,000 employees, another city with 1,000 employees, and soon after, the team started migrating users in four or five cities all at once.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were trainings before and after the migration just to make sure that things were moving smoothly,\u201d Nijhuis says. \u201cWe got amazing feedback from the team.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team was able to complete the migration by January 2021.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m proud of how Microsoft collaborates as a team. Everybody is willing to work together for alignment. Everybody is very inclusive and collaborative.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Chee Ming Tan, telecom engineer, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A sense of accomplishment<\/h2>\n

After having gone through several rounds of trial and error with location-based routing implementation in Microsoft Teams, the team successfully wrapped up 2020 with a renewed sense of accomplishment, being pioneers of LBR with Enterprise Voice in India.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m proud of how Microsoft collaborates as a team,\u201d says Tan, who was involved with the Skype for Business India implementation in 2013, and now the migration to Microsoft Teams in 2020. \u201cWe didn\u2019t lose that intense and deep collaboration. Everybody is willing to work together for alignment. Everybody is very inclusive and collaborative.\u201d<\/p>\n

K.C. Han, another senior engineer from the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team, is proud of building a solution that can help Microsoft\u2019s customers overcome the same challenge. \u201cUsing our roadmap and our solutions, other companies can also move to Microsoft Teams and implement the same thing,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Nijhuis echoes Han\u2019s assessment.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to this project, I\u2019m proud of being part of it from beginning to end,\u201d he says. \u201cMaking it as secure as possible and fulfilling all the requirements was our last hurdle for people to all be on Microsoft Teams. That\u2019s something to be proud of.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Related<\/figure>\n