Ignite 2019 - THR3044 - Top five things you need to know to optimize your network for Microsoft Teams

Presented by: Johan Delimon

Session summary:
Avoid the pitfalls that will break your intelligent communications experience for Microsoft Teams. Learn how you can optimize your internal and external network in order to deliver high quality communications in Microsoft Teams.

My Notes:

Johan took us on a history tour to the time before the Internet, then came firewalls and proxies. These devices were used for security, control and compliance. Next VPNs became popular to use from home or from other sites. When cloud services came we just accessed these through the firewalls and proxies in place. This might have been ok from a security standpoint, but not from a quality or media optimization view.

The issues were

• Proxy servers (TCP 80 & 443)
• Firewalls only allow Proxy Servers to Internet
• VPN used for Internet access
• Remote sites using a central internet breakout
• Office 365 not a trusted destination

Fixing the Issues

• Proxies
  Bypass the Proxy for Office 365 traffic and open the firewall for this traffic. Get a proxy that can use the "Office 365 IP Address and URL web service" to open for all the "Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges" in this list.
• Firewalls
  Allow all Office 365 IPs and Ports (TCP 443 & UDP 3478-3481 for Teams for example.) Also check if any internal firewalls or firewalls between sites are blocking media (TCP/UDP 50000-50059) between clients. In this case calls will still work since the clients can use the external Transport Relays to send media, but it is not optimal of course.  
• VPN
  Bypass the tunnel for Office 365 traffic by using split tunnelling
• Delay
  Connect to a Transport Relay as close as possible by using local Internet breakouts.
• QoS
  Use Windows Group Policy Objects to define QoS for the client.
  
  

 The road to happiness (or at least to good quality in Teams media)