Friday, April 17, 2026

Thursday, April 16, 2026

Saturday, January 10, 2026

Microsoft Support - The long and winding road

So for one of the non-profits I support we use Microsoft Teams for voice calls.  This works very well and is less expensive than all the other options.  At the start of 2025, Microsoft said they were adding SMS texting to teams which would be very nice for the non-profit to communicate with volunteers and for MFA for services that work with VOIP phone numbers.  So in Feb I signed up through the teams support portal and was added to the wait list.  In October they enabled SMS and I had to do 3 things to make it go live:

  • Fill out a form that allows PSTN operators to validate your company. This was easy and approved quickly
  • Create a 'brand' that is used to verify you with other SMS providers.  Again, pretty easy and approved quickly
  • Create a campaign.  This defines the use cases for SMS.  This is where things fell apart.
The problems started with the fact that Microsoft has multiple different service centers and the one you get when you click on the '?' on the main teams page cannot help with SMS.  However in trying to be helpful, they will waste weeks of your time trying to help until you finally reach a manager type who has enough knowledge to say they cannot help. They even wrote back one time that the screen shots I sent them were "from a third-party application. To better understand the situation, could you please clarify the following..."  See this post for more information.  The main helpdesk folks tried for 2 months to find me help and the best they could do was to give me this email pstn@microsoft.com which 


bounced.  Sigh.

The way it works is you fill out the forms and some automated system looks at them, approves or denies it.  The errors the system said I had made no sense such as CallToActionMissingOrInaccessible, but when I look at it all the links are good and the text is just like their example. Back in Feb, I was able to fill out the help form asking for SMS to be enabled.  In Oct this I get these options:

Notice that there is no case type for SMS.  When I pick General Inquiry I get this:

This is what I get when I interact with the chatbot:    
🤖 said:
If there is no specific case type for SMS campaigns, you can still open a new case by following these steps and providing detailed information about your issue:

Navigate to the Phone Number Service Center: From the Phone Number Service Center home page, you can find options to create a new case at the top of the page or at the bottom tile. Alternatively, you can go to the "View my existing cases" page or the "View my company cases" page.
Select Create a New Case: Choose the option to create a new case.
Provide Case Details:
Case Category: Select "Submit a new request" if you want to submit a new request related to your SMS campaign.
Country or Region: Select the country or region for which the phone number you are submitting this case for.
Case Type: If there is no specific case type for SMS campaigns, you can select a general case type that closely matches your issue or select "General inquiry".
Enter Case Title: Provide a title that summarizes your issue with the SMS campaign.
Notification Emails: Enter the list of people who will receive automated status notifications from Microsoft. This is optional.
Description: Describe the issue you are facing with your SMS campaign in detail. Include any error messages you have received and any steps you have already taken to try to resolve the issue.
Additional Supporting Documents: Upload any additional documents that might help in resolving your case.
Submit the Case: After entering all the required information, select "Submit". You will then see a new screen where you can view your case number.
If you need further assistance, you can contact the TNS Service Desk directly.                                    

The major issue is that you cannot follow the instructions as most of the case options such as General Inquiry above go directly to the chatbot which does not allow you to enter data into a form like the instructions (whoops infinite loop).  The other issue options are for porting numbers which I do not want to do. Hmm, perhaps re-open a previous ticket - nope that is not an option either.

Ok, lets try to find contact information for the TNS Service Desk.  Searching Microsoft public documentation gets this:

Sigh.  But, but, Google to the rescue.  I was able to find a phone number (800-416-3882).  The people there could not help, but gave me an email communications@tnsi.com.

So tried it and they had no clue what I was talking about.  Eventually I filled in a ticket for New TN Acquisition with fake data and finally got a hold of someone who could help.  Why they make it so hard to get help is beyond me.

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

Sending emails on new Blogger posts - version 2

In this post, I talked about using Make.com to send emails whenever I made a new blog post.  Unfortunately, that turned out to have many problems of which the main issue was that gmail required authentication every three days and you have to use the desktop browser version to re-authenticate.  In other words, it was not usable, especially from a phone.  I am now trying Zapier.com to see if it works any better.  It works a bit differently by using the RSS feed from blogger instead of logging into blogger to see if there is a new post.  Also it seems to be better about only getting a new post, not an older post and it checks every 15 minutes so I can post multiple times a day and people should get emails.  We will see how it works.

Sunday, December 28, 2025

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