Is Microsoft Teams the Right Choice for Your Next Unified Communications Platform?

by Heather Pearson

Microsoft Teams has become a powerful collaboration tool, with adoption rates exponentially accelerating during the pandemic. This surge has led many companies to evaluate whether integrating their external calling into Teams as the UCaaS platform makes sense, simplifying the communications stack for end users.

If your user population has heavily adopted Microsoft Teams for meetings, chat, file sharing and team collaboration and you have already invested in E5 licensing, you may be well positioned for bringing calling into Microsoft Teams. However, depending on your business communication needs, how you ultimately deliver calling into Teams depends on several factors, including:

• Countries where the business operates
• Feature and functionality requirements
• Device support, including integration to legacy analog and overhead paging systems.
• Local Microsoft administration resources and skill set
• Tolerance for down time and desire for failover strategies
• Expectations for implementation and day 2 customer support
• Total cost of ownership

Start the evaluation with the “Why?”

Before you begin this evaluation, it is important to understand the goal and why you are considering moving your PSTN calls to Microsoft Teams. Is the goal solely to simplify the end user experience by reducing their application stack, or is there a desire to consolidate management and administration into the Microsoft Admin Center? Understanding the motivation and goals is an important factor for identifying what options are available to you for consideration.

In what countries does the business need to support local numbers and calling?

While Microsoft continues to expand its coverage, there are still many countries where they cannot natively deliver local numbers and calling plans today, but Direct Routing and Operator Connect vendors who can.

Assess how employees utilize the current voice platform and what features and functionality are desired moving forward.

While Microsoft has been continually evolving to implement features assumed standard by most users, it still lacks the ability to provide many table stakes features to support the modern worker. Consider the business requirements for the following features, functionality and user experience that can create challenges in a purely native Microsoft Teams solution:

• SMS/MMS via business DID
• Reception Console Application
• Hosted/eFax
• Preference for extension based internal dialing
• Call reporting
• Call recording
• CRM Integration
• Is there a mobile first workforce that prefers to use mobile phones without the need for an app?
• Call Queues or Contact Center
  • Do you have groups who need to field customer calls and a need to offer on hold options to announce position in queue, opt out to leave a message, or for call back?
  • Are advanced call routing, skills-based routing, omni channel contact center, or CRM integrations required for these groups?
  • Do members of these groups communicate with other back office or specialty resources outside of the contact center?
  • Do call recording and reporting need to track calls flowing between these groups?

If the business requires access to these features, then your path to Teams calling will most likely involve working with a Direct Routing, Operator Connect, or even UCaaS provider who can supplement for these deficiencies in the native Microsoft platform.

Understand the business requirements for device support.

• Are you ready to cut ties with most physical phones in favor of the Teams app or will there be a significant continued demand for physical phones across the organization?
• Has there been a significant investment in VoIP phones and a desire to reuse them?
• Does the current platform integrate to Legacy Paging systems and/or utilize paging through phone speakers?
• Are there analog devices on the current platform such as door entry systems, fax machines or common area phones?
• Do you have the expertise in house for provisioning and supporting the phones and/or SIP gateways?

While Microsoft Teams supports physical phones, Teams certified phones come at a premium and may not deliver the end user experience required in some businesses. Microsoft has introduced a SIP Gateway to support many VoIP SIP phones and even analog gateways, but there are nuances, and pros and cons to weigh when deciding on the best solution for the business.

Consider your phone system administration and support needs, your resources, the expertise and skills required, as well as the call analytics demands of the business.

• Who administers the phone system today?
• Do you manage the Microsoft tenant in-house or use an MSP?
• Who needs to be able to contact support when there is a service impacting event with your phone lines, and are they all Microsoft Administrators?
• Are you comfortable navigating the porting process to bring your numbers over to Microsoft?
• Do local site administrators need to be able to make basic phone system changes and do you wish to grant them access to the Microsoft Teams Admin Center?
• Do you manage MACDs in-house or call your phone system or UCaaS vendor support team to make them for you?
• What is your team’s familiarity with running PowerShell scripts, and with Power BI?
• How frequently are changes made to call flows, AA prompts, greetings, hunt group membership, and new users added or removed?

When it comes to phone system management, businesses have come to expect the ease of administration realized in UCaaS solutions with intuitive portals that allow for changes to be made easily, even by non-technical staff and for those changes to take effect immediately. Implementing and managing the Microsoft Teams phone system means having the right skills available and potentially a shift in who manages the day-to-day changes necessary. We’ll match your business with the right Teams calling partner to either enhance your team’s capabilities or provide all the expertise necessary from implementation and porting to Day-2 MACD support services.

What is the business’ tolerance to outages impacting voice communications?

Simplifying the application stack could also mean introducing a single point of failure for all business communications. When deciding how to deliver calling into Microsoft Teams, this is one of the biggest factors in why businesses choose to use Direct Routing or Operator connect providers.

• Operator Connect and Direct Routing Enterprise Voice Carriers offer survivability in the event of a Microsoft outage, including call forwarding to alternate numbers, to mobile phones or even to a backup UCaaS platform.
• UCaaS providers inherently survive a Microsoft outage because the calling, phones, auto attendants, and call flows all reside on the UCaaS platform. UCaaS users can leverage call forwarding or proprietary softphones to stay connected if Teams becomes unavailable.

Consider your expectations, when there is a service affecting issue, for resolving issues related to voice and who may need to work with Microsoft to resolve them?

Microsoft support starts with Tier 1 generalists and IT teams face extended wait times for response and resolution, resulting in internal resources tied up in escalations and troubleshooting with Microsoft representatives.

Selecting the right value-add Operator Connect vendor with not only expertise in deploying and managing Microsoft calling solutions but direct partnerships with Microsoft and joint SLAs will ensure you receive the level of support you require in these circumstances, not to mention 99.999% to 100% up time SLAs.

Make sure to evaluate the true cost of deploying Microsoft Teams calling.

Although Teams has historically been bundled with O365 and M365 licenses, there are changes underway impacting current and future licensing with Microsoft and a decoupling of Teams from the previous bundles.

To use Microsoft Teams as your phone system, a business must have the following licenses with Microsoft:

• Microsoft user bundle that includes Teams, or in the near-future Teams add-on licenses
• A Phone System license per user (included in E5, but an add-on to E3 and other base licenses)
• A common area device license for any phone that is not associated with a Microsoft user account, such as a phone in a break room, on a manufacturing floor, or even a shared use phone in huddle rooms other workspaces.
• Finally, you need to license calling plans to provide numbers and PSTN calling, which can be acquired directly from Microsoft and their partner or with the many Direct Routing or Operator Connect providers in the marketplace offering competitive rates and value add services.

Consider Total Costs

Consider these additional factors that can further add to your total costs:

• Does the business have large blocks of reserve DIDs they wish to maintain?
• If the business requires analytics on calling, you will need Power BI for reporting.
• If users require access to features like SMS and hosted faxing or there is a need for a Contact Center solution or dashboards and reporting on native Microsoft queues, you will need to add 3^rd party solutions or work with a Direct Routing or Operator Connect partner that can provide these services, each coming with additional cost per user.

There is a path to providing your users with necessary features that are currently outside of the Native Microsoft Teams solution, but it’s important to understand the total user cost. When you piece together these separate licenses you are not only creating a more complex environment to manage, but you may pay a premium when compared to UCaaS providers who tend to bundle features into competitive per user licensing.

Making the right decision for your business.

With the right guidance, businesses decide on a sound path forward with Microsoft Teams, or they may ultimately determine that a UCaaS solution more closely aligns with their business requirements. Most businesses intent on bringing calling into Microsoft Teams do so by working with a Direct Routing or Operator Connect partner. Whether by delivering calling into the Microsoft Teams phone system or by using a UCaaS solution that integrates with Microsoft allowing users to take calls in their Teams apps.

In fact, of the businesses that have chosen to voice enable Teams, approximately 70% have chosen to acquire those services through a Direct Routing or Operator Connect provider rather than do so directly with Microsoft. This is generally because these providers not only deliver exceptional enterprise voice services and support, but also provide global coverage, supplement missing or limited features, provide professional services for implementation, end user and administrator training and enhanced Day 2 support for the Microsoft Teams Phone System and devices.

Bluewave is helping clients navigate this decision every day, through our Assess, Advise, Advocate approach.

• We work with you to assess the use of the current phone system, document required features & functionality, evaluate your current Microsoft licensing as well as identify your vendor support needs.
• We map out alignment of requirements and advise on potential vendor solutions for your consideration, based on your specific business needs and preferences.
• We engage with potential vendors on your behalf, relay requirements, coordinate demonstrations, map out distinctions between the vendors, and create a cost analysis for each solution to inform your decision process.
• Ultimately Bluewave will advocate on your behalf to negotiate a competitive price for services.

Bluewave’s Solution Advisory Team is working in this space every day, evaluating vendor solutions, keeping up with changes or advancements in offerings, as well as monitoring how well vendors deliver their solutions and support our customers, and we are here to put that expertise to work for you!

When you’re ready to get the right voice and collaboration solution for your organization, you’re ready for Bluewave. Get in touch!