Teams Phone migration checklist

This Teams Phone migration checklist is a free planning guide, and it is deliberately unglamorous. Work through it before you sign anything. Every item below is a fact we would otherwise have to discover on your behalf, slowly, at consulting rates.

It follows our four-part series for owners and leadership teams. Part 1 made the case for one platform, Part 2 covered meeting rooms, Part 3 explained Teams Phone, and Part 4 set out the five readiness areas. Here is the paperwork that turns those areas into a project.

Why the Teams Phone migration checklist comes before the quote

A statement of work is only as good as the facts behind it. Vague inputs produce padded estimates, because the estimator has to price the unknown. Precise inputs produce a tighter number and a shorter project.

Above all, gather the paperwork first. Microsoft names mismatched account information as the most common cause of porting errors and delays. That single detail derails more cutovers than any technical fault, and it is entirely preventable.

What to gather before the statement of work

Start with billing records, because they describe your phone system more honestly than any diagram does. Please have the following ready:

At least six months of invoices from your current provider, showing every number and extension you pay for.
The billing telephone number and account number, exactly as the carrier holds them.
The authorised user and service address on the account, again exactly as written on the bill.
Any account or port-out freeze, which your carrier must lift before numbers can move.
Your contract end dates and any early termination terms.
A staff list marking who needs a direct number, who only makes calls, and who never touches a phone.
An inventory of anything analog: fax, elevator phone, fire panel line, alarm circuit, overhead paging, door entry.

Why six months of invoices, specifically

One bill shows what you are paying today. Six months show what you actually own.

Quarterly and seasonal lines only surface across a longer window. So do the forgotten ones: a fax number nobody has sent to in years, a second analog circuit for a burglar alarm, a hunt group that still bills for eleven extensions when nine people work there. Consequently, six months of invoices routinely reduce the licence count we quote, because the number of lines on the bill and the number of people in the building are rarely the same.

Invoices also give us the extension map. That map becomes your dial plan, your queue membership and your porting list, so accuracy here saves rework everywhere downstream.

What still has to live on premises

Usually nothing, which is the happiest line in this Teams Phone migration checklist. With Microsoft Calling Plans or Operator Connect, there are no session border controllers to deploy or maintain, and no voice hardware in your comms room.

Direct Routing is the exception, and an analog estate is the usual reason to choose it. That route needs a certified border controller with a public address, a name from a domain you own, and a current TLS certificate. It also needs firewall rules for signalling and media, sized at roughly two media ports per simultaneous call.

Everything else is network work, and it applies to every option equally:

Quality of Service marking for voice, switched on in the Teams admin centre and matched on your switches and firewall.
Split-tunnel VPN, so call audio never detours through a tunnel.
Wired connections for desk phones, at roughly 100 kbps each.

Designing the call flow before anyone builds it

Auto attendants and call queues are business decisions wearing technical clothing. Settle them on paper first, then hand the drawing to whoever builds it.

For each branch of the tree, decide:

Your real business hours, plus after-hours and holiday behaviour. Anything outside business hours counts as after hours.
The wording of every greeting. Typed prompts cap at 1,000 characters, and uploaded audio files at 5 MB.
The menu options, kept to five or fewer. Microsoft recommends that limit because callers stop remembering after five.
Who the operator is, and which key reaches them.
For each queue: the people in it, how calls distribute, how long a caller waits, and where the call lands when nobody answers.

Two limits catch people out. First, a single call may pass through only 25 steps before Teams disconnects it, and bouncing back to a main menu counts as a step. Second, adding people to a queue by group scales to 200, whereas adding them individually does not.

Finally, build and test on temporary numbers. Microsoft recommends precisely that before you move your live main line, and it is the cheapest insurance in the project.

Emergency calling is a deliverable, not a checkbox

In Canada, every assigned number needs a registered emergency address. Dynamic location behaves much as it does in the United States, except that all Canadian emergency calls are screened nationally before they reach the local dispatch centre.

For location to be accurate, we need your network described properly:

The external addresses of each office, marked as trusted.
Validated, geocoded civic addresses, plus floors or suites where they matter.
Subnets, wireless access point identifiers, and switch and port identifiers per site.

Two practical consequences follow. Hard-wire your desk phones, because Teams phones cannot use wireless identifiers for location. Keep users on the desktop app too, since the browser version does not support dynamic emergency calling at all.

Then test each site by dialling 933. Microsoft also states plainly that emergency calls will not work when a device has no internet or no power. We therefore recommend keeping elevator and fire lines on their own circuit, and confirming those obligations with your building owner and inspecting authority rather than assuming.

Hardware comes last in the Teams Phone migration checklist

Hardware sits at the end for a reason. The licence, network and call flow decisions above determine what you can sensibly buy, so pricing handsets first tends to waste money.

Sort your people into three groups, then buy accordingly.

Softphone users need a certified headset and nothing more.
Desk phone users need a certified Teams phone. AudioCodes, Poly and Yealink are the three manufacturers currently on that list.
Shared spaces such as lobbies and warehouses use a shared licence. Note that the cheaper single-space tier does not include calling.

If your handsets are reasonably current Cisco, Poly, Yealink or AudioCodes models, SIP Gateway may let you keep them. It has real limits, though. It does not publish presence, so queue routing suffers, and that trade-off deserves a conversation rather than a spreadsheet line.

Reception is the interesting one. Microsoft ships no native switchboard. The Queues app supervises queues and coaches agents, but it requires Teams Premium and it is not a receptionist console. For a true switchboard, budget for a third-party product from a vendor such as Landis, Anywhere365, Luware, Enghouse or Imagicle, and ask each one where it stores your directory data.

Turning your Teams Phone migration checklist into a plan

Work through the list, then send it over. With those facts in hand we can write a fixed statement of work instead of a range, and we can tell you in the first conversation whether Direct Routing is genuinely necessary or merely habitual.

OPUS Consulting Group plans and delivers Teams Phone migrations for businesses across Canada. Our Microsoft integration, IT consulting and managed IT teams handle the discovery, the build and the cutover. Get in touch when your invoices are in hand.