Teams emergency call notifications meet all of the requirements of Kari’s Law, but they’re not super flexible. Microsoft received a bunch of feedback on this, and have a great solution.

At the most basic level of notification, you send a Teams chat message to a group of people. You can then layer on conferencing those same people into the emergency call, with or without the ability to unmute themselves. The users conferenced into the emergency call are the same list of users who receive the text notification, which isn’t great in some circumstances. For example, I would like to notify the intern sitting at the reception desk that an emergency call has been placed, but I would not want to conference them into a live emergency call. Anyone being conferenced in should be in the security department or similar, and not more “pedestrian” roles in the organization.

I recommend against allowing the ability to unmute, in most circumstances. The very last thing that a busy emergency call taker wants/needs is somebody unexpected talking over them as they’re trying to get the right response rolling. Unmute may be beneficial to a well-trained group of people who know to use it very selectively. The rest of us can just call 911 from a different phone, talk to a different call taker, and provide any additional information.

There’s also the option to conference in just one external phone number (which can also be just one internal number), with no method for them to unmute. This is a good option for a security desk where the staff don’t have Teams clients, or for a mobile phone.

For a more complex scenario – chat message to these people, email to these other people, conference in these Teams users, flash a light – there was no option in Teams that supported them. If an organization was using Direct Routing, some emergency service providers could offer additional services, and some people figured out how to have SBCs trigger a web hook when an emergency call was placed.

Microsoft has recently announced a preview of Graph API, with details available here. This API will provide the same information that Teams provides in its notifications, as well as to emergency services. As I become aware of services and apps that can consume this information, I’ll add their details to this post.

It is not an “either/or” choice of using the API or notifications built into Teams. You can easily configure both, using Teams for basic notifications, and the Graph API (and supporting applications) for richer flexibility.

Update on April 18 2025: Check out this demo video of ecall desktop notifier from Entergrade