Microsoft Teams Explained
Are you leveraging the full power of Microsoft Teams?
Teams is an important tool for businesses, facilitating video conferencing, secure sharing of files, and integrating with other Microsoft programs. However, many businesses are missing out on one of its most useful functions as a unified communications platform.
All of these great features can be combined with external calls, bringing your communications together in one convenient, powerful platform.
Teams Voice: Your unified communications platform
Most businesses are familiar with Teams as part of their Microsoft Office 365 package, but did you know that it can become your unified communications system?
By integrating Teams with 3CX, the world leader in hosted, cloud-based PBX software, you can truly unify your communications to seamlessly share files, chat with your contacts and make and receive local, national and international calls.
This allows you to do more than just share files and chat with your contacts; it means you can make local, national, and international calls through Teams from any of your devices.
No need for a legacy PBX business phone system — just the same, clean user experience you’re used to with Microsoft Teams. You also get to keep the functions that you rely on with your PBX system such as hold, forward, transfer, and voicemail in the cloud (among others), but Teams can offer you so much more.
Teams can work seamlessly across all your devices and syncs with your other Microsoft applications to create a complete experience. It simplifies your processes, allowing for improved efficiency across your business.
How to make calls from Microsoft Teams
One of the reasons businesses love Microsoft Office 365 is because it’s simple yet powerful. Everyone is familiar with the interface, and it’s easy to set up. This is a breath of fresh air compared to legacy PBX business phone systems, which can be quite complicated.
Buroserv can help you every step of the way and make sure that you get a communications system that’s tailor-made to fit your business:
- Check your Office 365 license to see if the Microsoft Phone System license is included.
- If you don’t have the Phone System license, then add it to each 365 user’s seat.
- Choose a call plan and specify how many concurrent calls your business needs.
- Let Buroserv take care of the setup.
Once you’re set up with Teams Voice, your calling will be synced with other Microsoft applications such as your contacts and calendar, making it simple to make external calls. You keep all your existing Microsoft Teams functions, but now you also have the option of placing a voice call to any number, adding an extra dimension to your communications.
You will have to make sure that you have MS Teams compatible desk phones, but once this is sorted, you can direct your calls to the device that works best for you.
The benefits of Teams Voice
Modern technology gives us so many different ways to communicate with people. What’s important for businesses is that these methods of communication come together to provide maximum efficiency.
When your communication platforms aren’t synced, it’s harder to maximise productivity. Time is wasted switching between apps, key conversations don’t get recorded, and information gets missed.
This is where a complete unified comms system like Teams Voice can step in.
Unify
With Teams Voice, you have one number for every call you make. Whether it’s through a landline, mobile, or desktop, you can send and receive local, national, audio, and video calls, and you get to keep your own number.
This makes everyone’s lives easier.
There’s no need to start a conversation through email and then have to pick up your mobile to call the same person. You can simply do everything in Teams, ensuring all the data is kept in one place and you’re not constantly switching between different devices and different software.
Integrate
Teams Voice allows you to make the most of the Office 365 suite by integrating your communications with other important functions.
You might be paying separately for your Office 365 package and your communications, but if they don’t sync, then you’re not going to get the most out of either of them. The more you can integrate your software, the more powerful it becomes, and for many businesses, Teams Voice can be the final part of this puzzle.
Collaborate
Having your most important software and communications all in one place makes it much easier for your teams to collaborate.
When someone’s editing a document in Word and they want to quickly get a colleague’s opinion, it should be easy to ping it across to them. If you’ve got to go through a more complicated process to share information or log in to different apps, people are less likely to make the effort.
The easier you make it to share, the more you facilitate collaboration.
Scale
One of the great things about cloud software such as Microsoft Teams is that it’s incredibly easy to scale. You’re not tied into long-term contracts, and you can quickly and easily add and remove seats as you need them.
This means that you never have to pay for extra capacity you don’t use.
You’re in control of your call plan and how many users you have on the Teams Voice platform, which allows you to scale as needed.
Support
With Teams Voice, you don’t have to invest in expensive hardware such as voice gateways, and you don’t have the expensive support that comes along with it. Instead, you can control your settings through the cloud from any device.
There are no ongoing support fees, and Buroserv will be there to help you every step of the way.
For more information on how Teams Voice can support your business, reach out to us here at Buroserv or discover our Teams offer on our product page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, provided your Teams licence includes Microsoft Phone System, which can be purchased separately. With a Teams phone system, you can have a single unified platform for all of your internal and external communications. You will need VoIP trunks to connect to the Teams phone system which are available from VoIP service providers such as Buroserv. They can also arrange porting so you can continue to use your existing phone numbers.
Microsoft Teams uses VoIP trunks to make and receive phone calls. These are available from VoIP service providers such as Buroserv. They can also arrange porting so you can continue to use your existing phone numbers.
Microsoft Teams is a unified collaboration application designed to make it easy for business staff to communicate with each other and their customers via messaging, phone or videoconference as well as enabling file sharing and the creation of collaborative workspaces. It integrates with other Microsoft apps such as Outlook so, for example, adding videoconferencing to a meeting invite is a simple as clicking a Team Meeting icon.
There's no need to download Teams to join a Teams meeting. All that's needed is to click the link in the meeting invite and you will automatically join the meeting.
