Skype for Business offered a few different ways to access your voicemail messages. As they were stored in your Exchange inbox, you could use Outlook to read speech-to-text transcriptions – assuming the message wasn’t too long, and the quality was good enough. You could also play the message in Outlook or a media player. Voicemail buttons in the Skype for Business client and deskphones dialed your voicemail. Lastly, you could dial in to the Exchange server using a Subscriber Access number. As a part of this dialin, you may have had to enter a PIN to authenticate you.

With Teams, Exchange UM is no longer used and has been replaced by Cloud Voicemail. One of the features that’s not present in Cloud Voicemail is the concept of subscriber access. Honestly I can’t say I miss it, with so many clients available that offer easier access to voicemail messages than mashing buttons to enter extensions and PINs, even if it were available I doubt that I would ever use it.

Along with Subscriber Access not being present in Cloud Voicemail, PIN authentication is also not implemented. This is because all other means of accessing your voicemail already require you to be authenticated.  This can cause some concern about voicemail being access from deskphones, but really there’s no change here in what you need to be doing from a security perspective. If you leave your desk, lock your PC and lock your phone. Yes, that’s two things that need to be locked and unlocked. Hopefully we’ll see a “better together” experience that provides for automatic phone locking and unlocking when the Windows/Mac/Linux system you’re on is locked or unlocked.

If you have a stand-alone phone that needs voicemail, then you’ll need to use the lock function on the phone.

And finally, note that emergency calls are permitted from locked devices.