I’m currently migrating from our Skype environment to Teams and one of the issues we had was that our internal user could not easily find the Auto Attendant or Call queue of our internal departments. Only when they searched on the virtual operator (Resource Account) full name, did they get the correct results. Fortunately, thanks to some input from my teammates we found a solution that Microsoft didn’t document. 😫
The Problem in detail
In our company we have a couple ServiceDesk departments that our internal user can contact through teams. One such department is the “Internal ServiceDesk”. When you tried to search for this department and entered the name “Internal” in the search field of the dial pad, it would return the correct result. So far so good…
But when you tried to search for “Servicedesk” or any other word in the title of a department’s name, you would not see the correct result. and only see names of departments of users starting with “Servicedesk”
This way of searching created a lot of frustration among our staff as they are used to searching for parts of the department’s name.
The Solution
As you might know, Resource Accounts are linked to an Auto Attendant or Call Queue and these accounts exist as User Objects in Azure AD. We were able to discover that the searchfield above the dial pad is using a “starts with”-method on multiple fields of that account. Unfortunately, when you create a resource account in the portal of Teams (or using Powershell), only the display name and UPN is filled in. As a result, the search field only checks these fields in Azure AD.
In our solution we are currently using the Display Name for the full name (obviously), the second word of the department as First name and the third word as Last name
Using this method, you can search for departments for up to three words.
Looking back at the solution, it does make sense, but at the same time is the use of Azure AD objects not the cleanest solution to implement these kinds of objects. But this is not the first and certainly not the last issue that we have discovered in Microsoft Teams.