What DDI Manager is
Why your numbers reach further than Teams — and what DDI Manager keeps track of
Microsoft Teams Phone handles the calls. DDI Manager keeps the books on the numbers those calls arrive on.
As a Teams Phone administrator you already have somewhere to look at your numbers. Under Voice → Phone numbers in the Microsoft Teams admin center you can see the numbers the tenant knows, who they are assigned to, and what type they are. That view has one clear boundary: it only knows the numbers Teams knows.
What sits outside Teams
- Numbers in use somewhere else. A number that terminates on a legacy PBX, in a contact centre or on an emergency line does not exist in Teams — but it does exist in the range you received from your carrier, and it must not be reused.
- Why a number is free. Teams can tell you that a number is unassigned. It cannot tell you whether it is genuinely free, reserved for a project, in quarantine after someone left, or in the process of being cancelled.
- The intent behind a range. That the last 30 numbers in a range are earmarked for call queues and auto attendants is written down nowhere. It is something a colleague happens to know.
- Numbers not yet ported. Ranges you have ordered, or are in the middle of moving, do not exist in Teams until porting completes.
None of this is a shortcoming in Teams Phone. The Teams admin center is built to administer Teams — not to keep the books on a set of phone numbers that is older than Teams and broader than Teams.
The four areas of DDI Manager
| Area | What it is |
|---|---|
| DDI Ranges | The day-to-day working view — your number ranges with carrier, connectivity type, available numbers and utilisation, down to the individual number and who holds it. |
| User Management & Automation | Provisioning — assigning a number to a user, and seeing licences, policies and location across every user. |
| DDI Utilization | The highest consumption in a chosen period, and when that peak occurred. The peak is typically what you are billed on. |
| DDI History | How consumption has developed month by month, up to two years back. |
DDI Manager supports Calling Plan, Operator Connect and Direct Routing, and it sits in the Coherence top menu under DDI Manager — User and DDI configuration.
What it does not do
DDI Manager does not route calls, and it does not configure auto attendants or call queues — that is Call Flow Designer. Nor does it administer Teams itself. It keeps the number estate straight, so everything built on top of it has something reliable to stand on.
Next relevant articles
- Getting started with DDI Manager — the four areas, and how to find your way around.
- Number ranges — what they are and how to read them — connectivity type, available numbers and utilisation, column by column.
- Labels in DDI Manager — how labels cover the numbers that live outside Teams.