CloudPBX Voicemail Play on Phone strangeness....

A little quirk that has been thrown up as we've been moving more of our internal staff to "THE CLOUD" is that voicemail playback seems inconsistent in its delivery.

Scenario:


Voicemail left for me. I can see it in my Outlook inbox:



And its showing up as an MP3 attachment in IOS:



I decide that I want to listen to the voicemail discreetly as it may contain sensitive content so instead of just pressing the play button so that it comes out of my speakers I press the Play on Phone in the Outlook message.....



Outlook asks where I want to play the message, I leave this as the default as I want it to ring my SfB client.....



Call connects and I get "End of message, press 1 to replay message" In an British accent. Strange I think, maybe the call didn't connect in time. So I press 1 on the keypad and the ever helpful Microsoft lady again says "End of message, press 1 to replay message" Its almost like she can't deal with the encoding of the file.

After hanging up I confirm I can listen to the message on both the play icon in Outlook and the MP3 file on the iPhone. Both succeed.

Moving over the Sfb Client (Office 2016 MSI), I can see the voicemail and pressing the play icon plays the voicemail locally via my default communication device - result, the whole office hasn't heard that message.







At this stage I think it must be a problem with Office365 not being able to deal with the message.

For fun I then try via Call Voice Mail feature in the client expecting it to not work....



But it does..... Announced by a nice American accented lady.....

ookkaaay....

I then move back to the Play on Phone and notice that all of the voice prompts are in British English. At this point I'm assuming that somehow using local Outlook I'm being forced via the old on-prem Exchange Server that can't handle the cloud mailbox (this assumption is 'cause of the British accent).

For fun I move over to Outlook on the Web for Business ( I remember the days of Outlook Web Access) and get that to call me, assuming that I'll have the American lady again and she'll be able to play me the message.






And the Brit starts speaking to me...... I navigate the voice tree and she says she'll play the message (telling me the time the VM arrives and also who it is from "Plus fourty four, seven seven seven five....." etc)......

.....and there's no content again . So at this point in time its like the American lady can understand the MP3 file but the British one can't - and that's probably as its an American invention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Development  ;-) 

I've raised a ticket with Microsoft and will update this post when I get a response.

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Update: 21st November 2016

On the ongoing ticket we have confirmed that a user who is homed on-prem for SfB but on Office365 for Exchange can consistently hear the message. Still no word on why though.

4 comments:

  1. I opened a case with premier support the other day on the Play on Phone "End of message" issue you described as I had been setting a customer up on Cloud PBX and it randomly stopped working. The engineer confirmed with the product group that Play on Phone is currently in beta and not expected to be functional, and so the customer opted to disable Play on Phone using Set-CsOnlineUMMailboxPolicy.

    Curious, lately have you had the attendant ask callers "Are you still there?" when they are recording a voice mail as if there's a one way audio issue, but still have the voice mail properly recorded and delivered?

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  2. I've seen this recently in hybrid environments. I figured that it was a UM/Azure Voice Mail configuration issue. . . Interesting that MSFT is confirming that it isn't working yet. . . I wonder if cloud only deployments are affected. . .

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  3. same issue and MS premier support confirmed, that play on phone will not work using cloud PBX & Azure voicemail

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