The Covid-19 lockdown has been a bit of an eye opener for a lot of businesses, their staff can be productive when working from home. One of the things that has helped revolutionise the way a lot of businesses now operate is Microsoft Teams.
Having the ability to work together whilst being remote from each other has always been a challenge but with Microsoft Teams people have found this to be a lot easier. If you don’t know what Microsoft Teams can do, here is a brief summary:
- Chat messages
- Presence (free, busy, do not disturb, away etc)
- Team sites where you can share chat, files, power apps, tabs etc
- Calls between teams clients including video conferencing with the right hardware
- Calls to and from other phones with the right configuration
- Conference calling with internal and external users including dial in with the right configuration
- Opening and collaborating on the same files at the same time with others inside and outside your organisation
Teams is a fantastic collaboration tool, it allows people to work and share like never before and it has really helped businesses adapt to new ways for working flexibly, allowing teams to continue to work together where they couldn’t in the past.
One thing we have been doing is a lot more of is helping businesses get more out of Teams but extending the voice capability through the audio conferencing (with dial in conference number, PIN and moderator codes) and also integrating Teams into the businesses telephony through one of three ways:
- use Microsoft Phone system and port the business numbers over away from the traditional on prem PBX and either Microsoft E5 licensing or E3 with Microsoft Phone licensing and a dial plan
- deploy and on premises session border controller that is MS Teams enabled, Microsoft direct routing and either Microsoft E5 licensing or E3 with Microsoft Phone licensing whilst using the existing dial plan
- use a cloud based service with a monthly contract to effectively rent a session border controller in the cloud to integrate with the PBX and then use either Microsoft E5 licensing or E3 with Microsoft Phone licensing whilst using the existing dial plan
The third option is the most popular with organisations as it allows rapid onboarding of the solution without a long term financial commitment or capital expenditure costs and it can be flexed up and down as needed.
If you want more information about how to get the most out of Microsoft Teams and being able to collaborate please call us on our Teams number 020 3744 8548