Review on Yealink MP56 Teams Microsoft Certified Teams by Linda Fournier

Although I wasn't initially thrilled with the branding, this product is recommended by Microsoft so I took the risk and I'm so glad I did! I really like this MP56 phone! Okay, first and foremost this is NOT a regular wall phone. It will NOT work with regular analog phone lines or home office phone lines. No cord or plug to plug into phone wall jack, don't even try! This phone is primarily designed to be used as a Microsoft Teams phone. It can also be used as a SIP endpoint, connecting to one or more (16 in fact!) SIP service providers. If you don't know what Teams is, you should check it out at Microsoft, but by the way, if you don't know what Teams is and you don't know what SIP service is, you SHOULD NOT buy this phone. In order to use this phone as intended, you must be a Microsoft Teams user. While you can sign in to a Teams phone with a personal account, that phone is typically reserved for business users. This means that to use this phone, you must have a Microsoft 365 *Business* or *Corporation* account with a Teams-qualified license (most of them). Although I hope this will change in the future, as of this writing (September 2021) you can make actual PSTN phone calls (i.e. Phone System License and Data Plan, both of which are only available to business users. In private mode or without a Phone System License you can do this Use device but it is limited. This phone is generally intended for office use. Stand, handset and handset cord plus an ethernet cable but NO separate power adapter. If you use this phone at home or don't have POE or not intending to connect to ethernet you can purchase a separate power adapter a few bucks more - it's worth it.This phone also has built-in wi-fi capabilities and prefers wi-fi over ethernet when setting up wi-fi.it works alone Which is fine with both connections but don't use both at the same time The first thing you do when buying this phone is like that ll is to turn it on and update the firmware. My phone arrived with six year old firmware and was missing many of the features currently offered. So just decide you want to update the firmware - you just download the .ROM file from the Yealink website, open a web browser on the phone's built-in web server and download it. Easy. After updating the firmware and getting the necessary licenses, I jumped into this phone and it was a real pleasure to use. Everything just works. I've made and received calls, PSTN calls, I was able to make appointments, access my calendar and other apps from the touchscreen and everything was just perfect. It was exciting and a real pleasure. As I mentioned, this phone *also* supports SIP and can be signed into Teams AND SIP accounts at the same time. All of this can be easily configured using a local web browser connected to the phone. I set up an Asterisk v18 phone system with PJSIP out of the box and again everything just worked. I was able to add my account details through the web browser and have the phone registered correctly, and I was able to make and receive calls over SIP again even when logged into Teams.Negatives? Two. If you're a US user, please note that the manuals are clearly translated and don't really contain much flesh. As a review they are good, but nothing more. You can visit the Yealink website and watch it for free if you are interested. Another downside was that when making or receiving calls via Teams or SIP, every time I started speaking, the first 0.25 seconds or so of my voice was cut off. cut off. So for example "Hello?" was sent as "Oh?". If I said "tick one, two, three," you would hear "one, two, three." The Yealink website didn't help, but I played around with all the settings on the phone's internal web server and found a setting that fixed the problem. Under noise reduction they have a thing called "Acoustic Shield" and as of firmware 44 it doesn't work well. Turn this thing off (it's the bottom dropdown menu, set it to Disabled) and save it and this problem will go away. It was like night and day - after turning it off there was no lag, no lag and literally perfect sound. Products as I will be expanding my Teams installs in the future. Feel free to buy (and choose a power supply if necessary) - you will be happy!