Microsoft PBX Support

Microsoft announces plans to end third-party PBX support for Exchange Online Unified Messaging in 2018.

17:30 17 August 2017

Microsoft will end third-party PBX support for Exchange Online Unified Messaging in July 2018, which gives affected organisations barely a year to migrate completely to Skype for Business or find another third-party service.

 

According to the company’s announcement, the vendor is retiring its session border controllers (SBCs) and ending third-party PBX support for Business protocols to provider higher quality of service for voicemail.

 

Michael Brandenburg, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan in San Antonio, said: "I would anticipate quite a few long days for IT admins, as well as more than a few professional services contracts being signed to cope with the changes,"

 

He added that the change could be motivated by bandwidth and quality-of-service concerns.

 

"SIP [Session Initiation Protocol] interoperability has been an ongoing challenge for service providers and vendors," he said. "It's not a big leap to suggest that supporting a high-quality unified messaging service at such scale as Office 365 has become untenable for Microsoft."

 

Affected organisations have the option to migrate to Office 365 Cloud PBX or to Skype Business Server Enterprise Voice on premises.