Teams Emergency Calling Policies (ECPs) fulfill some critical features. They have the setting to turn on or off “external location lookup mode”, which lets a user enter or confirm their address should they not be on a properly configured internal network, it allows a disclaimer to be displayed, and it determines who is notified when an emergency call is placed.

The emergency notification portion has just received an upgrade. There used to be only one notification option. This meant that IT staff using 933 to test emergency call routing would also be sending notifications, and it’s less than ideal to overwhelm notification recipients with testing.

Additionally, many countries have multiple emergency numbers – say one for police, one for fire, and one for ambulance – where different internal notification groups could be useful. For example, first aiders could be notified for calls to an ambulance but not a police scenario. I’ve also had organizations that wanted internal-only security numbers to generate internal notifications but otherwise not tie in to the 911 process. The scenario here was hospital security where someone may need security for access to a restricted area, or urgent security for an angry patient that was not yet a “get the police here” type of scenario.

The new ECP setup allows different notification groups and conference-call policies to be applied to a different “Emergency Dial String”, which is the emergency number that will be called. This is different than the emergency dial mask, which is the numbers that a user may enter to place a call. For example, the Emergency Dial String would be “911”. The Emergency Dial Mask numbers would be “911”,”9911″,”112″,”999″. Calling any of these four numbers will result in a call to 911. In the ECP notification settings, we define notifications for calls to 911, and not to the individual four mask numbers that could be dialed.

Here is an example configuration:

“Default” is what you will find for configurations that existed before this feature overhall. In North America that’s probably “911”. In a newly created ECP, you won’t see “default”.

Here I’ve set “artemis@torren.ca” to be notified via Teams chat when 222 is called. Should 123 be called, +14258675309 will be conferenced in – and here, no users will be send a Teams chat message.

This flexibility is a welcome addition to emergency calling in Teams!

I’ve used “dial string” and “dial mask” here, but haven’t covered where they’re defined. Adding a dial string number here alone won’t result in notifications. You will need to also configure an Emergency Call Routing Policy with the dial string(s) and dial mask(s) that you wish to use. This tells Teams to recognize these numbers as emergency calls, and for Direct Routing, tells Teams how to route those calls. (Note that Operator Connect and Calling Plan users don’t need to define emergency routes nor indicate that 911 and 933 are emergency numbers in North America for example… See my next post for way more details on this and Shared Calling in particular!)