Teams Insider

Scaling Partner Management of Teams Phone in SMB and Midmarket

Mark Herbert co-founded Call2Teams at Qunifi (acquired by Dstny) and is now launching Haptap Call Manager, a multi-tenant Teams Phone management portal for partners. He talks to Tom Arbuthnot about where the SMB and mid-market Teams Phone opportunity is heading, why the channel struggles to make sma

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Who should listen: Microsoft partners and MSPs delivering Teams Phone at volume in SMB and mid-market, Operator Connect and direct routing providers looking at post-sale provisioning, and service owners weighing how much voice admin to delegate to a partner.

Guest: Mark Herbert — Co-founder, Haptap

Key insights

Copilot is now pulling the phone conversation forward: enterprises a few thousand Copilot seats in are moving voice into Teams so transcription and call data sit in the same place as everything else. Herbert's read is that Microsoft deliberately took its foot off the gas on Teams Phone a year ago to concentrate on AI, and is now using AI as the pull factor for voice take-up. ▶ 4:36
The SMB voice economics don't work for most partners: a five- or ten-number deal can't justify the setup time, and Operator Connect partners keep hitting the same wall — easy to sell the numbers, then the customer asks what happens next. ▶ 6:08
The channel is split down the middle — IT-centric partners don't know voice, voice-centric partners don't know Microsoft — so the design bet is to put a familiar PBX control panel over Teams Phone rather than teach either side the other's world. ▶ 8:42
Sub-300-seat customers on Business Premium already have the stack to add Teams Phone; with Operator Connect the connectivity is largely solved, so manageability is now the real blocker. ▶ 7:39
Consent model matters for partner adoption: the customer clicks an emailed link to grant the app Graph permissions scoped only to Teams Phone config, so partners work across tenants from their own Entra ID without separate browser profiles or shared local admin accounts, and without access to anything beyond voice. ▶ 12:18
Setup automates the bits partners get wrong — pre-flight checks (and in some cases fixes) for resource accounts, licensing and permissions, plus bulk configuration of public holidays into the tenant, and cascading call queues built in seconds where hand-crafting would be roughly 70 lines of PowerShell. ▶ 14:21
To settle the perennial "who changed the config" argument between customer and managed service provider, every action in the portal is logged, and a configuration management module in development will take regular snapshots of tenant Teams Phone config, show the delta since your last login and allow roll-back after temporary changes. ▶ 21:29
Pricing is heading towards an all-you-can-eat model with some relation to users under management — the logic being that partial coverage leaves the partner carrying two different support and training experiences. ▶ 24:02
Dstny took an equity stake rather than absorbing the team, on the view that a startup body can move faster than the group's normal processes — Herbert, Richard and Martin pitched it as an entrepreneurial venture with its own mission. ▶ 23:01