Teams, Missing inbound calls? Check Windows, Now.

By | December 12, 2020

I’ll keep this one relatively short, but on recent Teams rollout with calling. I had several users complain that inbound calls (both PSTN and Teams) were not being presented to them at all and would simply ring for 20 seconds and goto voicemail.

  • SBC Call logs didn’t show anything.
  • Teams Logs looked normal
  • Teams notifications were reset to defaults.
  • Helpdesk cleared the user’s Teams cache and re-installed Teams
  • I even checked the users status myself and they were set to Available
  • We even tried another PC with the same user profile and the issue persisted.

Turns out Teams was doing everything perfectly fine. But Windows was hiding all the notifications as Quiet Hours was enabled.

Another potential culprit is Focus Assist, which replaced Quiet Hours in the Windows 10 April 2018 update, thankfully it blocks notifications based on a few rules.

You can check to see if these are active quickly by clicking the Notification icon to the right of the clock in Windows 10 to access Action Center. Then check to see if Focus Assist or Quiet Hours are set

Focus Assist, Off
Focus Assist, On

Disabling it

Simply disable these by clicking the icon and suddenly inbound calls will start “working” again.

You can take this a step further by adjusting the automatic rules to prevent it from switching back on.

Right-click the Focus Assist toggle and click Go to Settings

A new window will appear, In the Automatic Rules section, turn everything off.

Unfortunately, the “Priority” function doesn’t work with Teams as it only works with Windows Store apps.

Pre-empting it

You can also push out a Group Policy that disables Quiet Hours outright.

Open Gpedit and navigate to Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar > Notifications and adjust as required.

If you need more information on the Group Policy it can be found here.

Anyway, I hope this helps someone. Till next time.

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