NewsUC&C26 Sept 2023 · 4 min read

Get Ready - Microsoft is Changing Teams' SIP Certification

Why it matters: Microsoft Teams Direct Routing calls could fail on 3 October unless SBCs align to the new MSPKI CA and DigiCert Global Root G2. Published on UC

Kieran Devlin

Microsoft changes Teams SIP certification

If you're a business that uses Microsoft Teams Direct Routing, prepare yourself — Microsoft is changing Teams' SIP certificate at the start of October.

Microsoft is switching Teams to the new MSPKI Certificate Authority (CA). After two successful tests on September 5 and 19, Microsoft will make the final switch to the new CA on October 3, beginning at 10 a.m. UTC.

This applies to Microsoft Teams Direct Routing and Azure Communication Services Direct Routing SIP certificates. Critically, if an organisation's Session Border Controllers (SBCs) aren't aligned with the new CA, incoming and outgoing Direct Routing calls won't work.

Microsoft's recent blog on Direct Routing wrote:

If your Session Border Controllers (SBCs) aren't properly configured with the new Certificate Authority (CA), your Direct Routing incoming and outgoing calls will fail after the switch. Please work with your SBC vendor directly for further guidance on SBC configuration."

All Microsoft SIP endpoints will be incrementally switched to use certificates where the certificate chain will align with the "DigiCert Global Root G2" CA.

The change requirement and tests were conveyed to Direct Routing customers via the Message Centre and Service Health Incidents in the Microsoft Admin Portal (MC540239, TM614271, MC663640, TM674073, MC674729).

What Are the Big Teams Stories This September?

Last week was a momentous one for Microsoft and Teams, including the news of the long-anticipated release dates for its AI-powered productivity tool Copilot.

Copilot was released for consumers on Windows this week, while Copilot 365 will roll out for enterprise customers on November 1. Microsoft also introduced a soft relaunch for Copilot. As well as a snazzy new logo, Microsoft stated that it was rolling all the individual Copilots together as one unified product “for a consistent user experience” rather than what had been originally intended as separate Copilot AIs for different services, namely Windows 11, Bing and Edge.

What 365 Copilot offers beyond Microsoft Copilot is commercial data protection, guaranteed security, privacy and compliance, the AI-powered Microsoft 365 Chat, and integration across the Microsoft 365 Apps.

365 Copilot can provide real-time summaries and action items from Teams meetings. Copilot can generate new Word projects or blogs by directing them towards files, which it can use as prompts. It can visualise data or projections in Excel. In Outlook, Copilot can personalise any email to match a user’s unique style and tone of voice, including personalised sign-off.

Microsoft also released its Surface Hub 3 last week, which provides an all-in-one hybrid device for meetings and cross-collaborations. Microsoft has fully designed the new collaborative board to offer end-to-end consistency for businesses with Surface Hubs and Microsoft Teams Rooms.

The board will provide access to Teams Rooms for Windows, enabling more universal experiences across different meeting spaces on the platform. Teams can move between virtual rooms, streamlining the device’s touch interface and console-based Teams Rooms.

Microsoft also announced that developers will be billed for using its billing and recording APIs in Teams. Billing for the APIs began on September 1, with recordings costing $0.03 per minute and transcriptions priced at $0.024 per minute.

Meanwhile, the European Commission's investigation into Microsoft's allegedly uncompetitive practice of bundling Teams with Office continues after considering Microsoft's concession of unbundling the two products insufficient. The regulatory body is preparing a statement of objections to send to Microsoft, which will probably arrive in the next few months.

A Google executive described Microsoft’s concession to unbundle Teams from its Office suite as “too little, too late”. Amit Zavery, Vice President, General Manager and Head of Platform at Google Cloud, spoke to The Register about why he maintained the unbundling offer wouldn’t work.

Zavery highlighted that it would only apply to the European Economic Area: "I don’t even know how Microsoft can justify this. The funny part to me, as a vendor, is to be able to say [to a customer with a] straight face, ‘You know what, we’ll do this for this particular country or region, and it’s the same issue for the rest of the world, but we will not do it for the rest of the world’… What’s the reason for that?"

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