Step-by-Step Guide: Pinning a Phone Number on Microsoft Teams Side Rail

by HubSite 365 about Martin Heusser

I am building and automating Microsoft Teams Phone Solutions and Call Flows.

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Become a Microsoft expert: Learn to pin a phone number on Teams Side Rail

A company's internal emergency response teams often have internal/local emergency numbers that need to be prominently placed on a user's computer, such as on the taskbar, the start menu or the desktop. Similarly, it's possible to place a link to start a call to a phone number on the Microsoft Teams side rail, where all the apps like Activity, Chat, Teams, Calendar, Calls etc. are pinned.

The way to do this is to execute a deep link to a tab in a Teams channel, which can also work with a Teams calling deep link. To achieve this, two things are needed:

A Teams App
Any type of web server to host one or multiple html files

The beginning phase is to host the HTML file on any platform or service that can serve a html file publicly. This HTML code will create a calling deep link, and you just need to replace the phone number. Then upload the file to your web server. You can create multiple HTML files with different names and numbers if you have multiple locations with different emergency numbers and upload them to the same location as the first file.

Next up is creating the Teams App. Sign in with a Teams admin account, go to Apps, click + New app and give your app a name. Plug in all the necessary information you need for the App, including the App ID, Basic information, App features, and Personal app tab. Save your tab app. If all steps have been followed, an app in the siderail which can start a call pops up, but you do have to publish the app in your tenant first.

Finally, ensure that you don't forget to add the app to the global app setup policy, if there's only one location. In the case of multiple offices in different locations or countries, you'll need to create a separate app for each number and create and assign different Teams app setup policies to the users based on their location. Each policy will then pin a different app where each app will link to a different html file.

Expanding the Use Cases

Aside from pinning emergency numbers, this use case can be expanded to any number. For example, some companies may want to pin their IT service desk hotline to the side rail. One thing worth mentioning is that the phone number you put in the html file can theoretically be viewed/obtained by anybody with internet access. However, as your company's main number is probably listed on your home page anyway, the risk may not be significant.

Read the full article Step-by-Step Guide: Pinning a Phone Number on Microsoft Teams Side Rail

Learn about Step-by-Step Guide: Pinning a Phone Number on Microsoft Teams Side Rail

This text provides a guide to pinning a phone number on Microsoft Teams side rail, a feature that may benefit companies with internal emergency response teams. It discusses the possibility of placing a link on the Teams side rail to start a call to a phone number, using a deep link. The author refers to two blog posts about creating Teams calling deep links and about running any website as a Teams app. The process involves building a Microsoft Teams App and hosting one or multiple HTML files on any kind of platform that can serve a file publicly. There's also an example of HTML code to create a calling deep link by replacing the phone number after 4:%2b with your number, and a note that to make it work in the new Microsoft Teams client, '+' has to be replaced with '00'.

Keywords

Microsoft Teams emergency number pin, Microsoft Teams sidebar phone link, Microsoft Teams side rail call link, Microsoft Teams deep link calling, Microsoft Teams HTML linking

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