Worksighted NXT Webinar | Replace Your Phone System: Cloud Calling in Microsoft Teams
About the Webinar
The transition to remote work has left many companies reevaluating their technology ecosystem. Phone systems are one that we are getting an increasing amount of questions about. With the vast adoption of Microsoft Teams, many companies are curious about their cloud calling options.
During this webinar, we covered:
- Journey of Telephony
- Function and features of Microsoft 365 Voice including domestic calling and audio conferencing
- Demo of user and admin experience
- Licensing options
- Next steps & Q&A
Wondering what’s next? If you are already on Office 365, sign up for a free 30-day trial of Microsoft 365 Business Voice. This will unlock the full functionality right in your Teams account and the transition to a paid version is seamless. We can help you get started. Schedule your trial today.
Intro & Welcome
Adam Devereaux:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another Worksighted NXT event. My name is Adam Devereaux. And with me today, I have a few other coworkers here at Worksighted. So next to me is Blaine Courts, who is one of our design engineers on the advanced services team. We also have Matt Maines, who’s our Chief Technology Evangelist here at Worksighted. And he’s going to be in the background answering questions. We are going to have a Q&A throughout the event, go and ask your question at any time using the Q&A function here in Teams. And then we’ll either answer them in chat, or we’ll address them at the end during the Q&A section. We also have Rebecca, who is our wizard in the background, handling all the wires and buttons to make this magic work. So thanks, Rebecca.
So today we’re going to talk a little bit about, obviously, Microsoft 365 Voice, Business Voice or Teams Voice. So there’s a couple different product names. But really, we want to or I want to take a little bit of a journey, a little conversation, kind of looking at the history of how we got here, kind of positioning it against maybe the way that businesses thought about Voice previously. So I’ll monologue a little bit. You’ll have to bear with me.
We’re going to talk about the journey of telephony. We’re going to go into the product a little bit, talk about what it is and why there’s a couple different names, then we’re going to go into a little demo of the user experience, the admin experience, and why you might want to consider it and then how you could get started and demo and test it yourself and then have the Q&A section.
Journey of Telephony
So the journey of telephony sounds a little heady, but really the idea here is that phone needs have changed a lot for businesses in the last few decades. I’ve been working with phone systems for the better part of 20 years either as a user of phones, an administrator of phone systems, or installing and consulting on phone system needs for a lot of different organizations. And we’ve worked with businesses. I like to think of kind of a spectrum of need from the simplest organizations, a three man nonprofit, where they just use their cellphones, where it’s BYOD. Maybe it’s not even corporate cellphones. And then on the other end, you have extremely complex phone environments where there’s intricate needs. There’s lots of functionality that’s customized, lots and lots of phone calls, I think like a call center, maybe a medical facility. And they really need a robust phone system with lots and lots of capabilities.
Well really, a lot of this conversation is about optimizing where you are on the spectrum. And I think a lot of organizations have shifted where calling is taking place, what they need from the system is different than what it used to be. So if we take a step back and think about what you needed if you were going to start a business, let’s say 10 years ago, even seven years ago, you would have gotten an office building. You would have gotten lots of cubicles and put those in. You would have put computers in the cubicles and a desk phone sitting on the desk in a cubicle and a person sitting in a cubicle.
And when users are working their workday, nine to five or whatever sitting in the cubicle, they’re going to use that desk phone to call each other. And that’s like they find the extension sheet, look up somebody’s extension, if you don’t know it, punch it in, try and call them directly. So that’s what I call internal calling. And then external calling is when people are calling them maybe via the main number and it gets transferred to them via receptionist or a direct dial number, a DID number, where it’s dedicated to that person and the call rings right to the phone. And then they can call external phone numbers. So that’s called PSTN as a term where you’re talking about the public switched telephone network.
So when I use a cellphone, and I have a phone, a classic house phone, let’s say from Charter, Comcast or AT&T, that’s really the PSTN. I’m dialing a 10 digit, nine digit, 10 digit phone number, and I’m making a PSTN call.
So what’s really kind of changed is there obviously were some pretty major limitations if the only way I can interact with this business telephony system is if it’s sitting at my desk. So we did some things in the intervening years, moved to VoIP systems, even though in many cases that still means it’s something physically in your building, whether it’s a server, software or pieces of hardware, but it’s using voice over IP. It’s using computer networks on the underlying kind of substrate.
But we needed to find ways oftentimes of letting particular people, maybe you had a few people that were working remotely, you needed to give them access to kind of connect back into this phone system that everyone else is interacting with through their desk phone. And so you’d have them use a soft phone, which is either software that can run on a laptop or on a phone to allow them to connect. And we really ran into a lot of challenges with cellphones, getting users to adopt them, getting users trained on a whole another system. A lot of times those few people like a salesperson that you’d give the soft phone to, they just end up using their cellphone anyway most of the time to make these calls.
Most of the time as a business, you would care about that because you want maybe your external number to go out, which is one of the things you need to think about as well as caller ID presentation, whether or not you want people from your organization contacting customers and vendors from what might be a personal number. But really, that had some major limitations. Oftentimes, you are still dependent on that hardware in that building. You are dependent on phone service from a particular provider, like a SIP service or a PRI trunk or something along those lines. And if you look at the the phones that were used, it was still very much around this mentality of I’ve got a desk phone, I’ve got a PBX, I’ve got my internal phone system, and then maybe I’ll create some ways to connect. And it doesn’t even need to be said, we’ve obviously shifted into a new era of remote work and we’ve really run into some challenges where we’ve had a lot of customers say, “What value is this old phone system doing for me?” I just forwarded some numbers to people’s cell phones. And otherwise, there it sits.
And oftentimes in the past, it may have been a catalyzing event like a system dying or a big upgrade that needs to happen, that made them start thinking about doing something different, because we just take it for granted. But I think this remote work era has been a big catalyzer for this conversation.
So we think there are better ways of doing things. Obviously, there’s no one system that fits everyone. But there are kind of some unique advantages, I think, to Microsoft 365 Business Voice, Teams voice calling, that we’ll kind of get into the specifics.
But one of the big things that we need to think about too is I mentioned there’s the internal calling and the external calling. And those really have changed a lot. If I look at Worksighted or a lot of other clients that have been on a Teams journey, in many cases, that’s kind of become the de facto internal phone system. If I’m going to call somebody at Worksighted, you’re going to call somebody at Worksighted, typically, what are you going to use?
Blaine Courts:
Yeah, by then basically using Teams since we all went remote, very rare that I would call somebody’s cellphone. It’s just all integrated in the same app with video, audio conferences, screen sharing. It really is just super easy to use.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. And one of the first things we really adopted with Teams is we replaced Skype for Business. And so we started doing instant messaging in Teams. And so it was a pretty easy step, because you got that little call button right up in the top corner. And once we really adopted it for multi person meetings, that really I think unlocked the door. Everyone had the audio setup at that point. We’re using teams for doing these video calls. So if I’m going to call Maines, I’m just going to do a video call and whether it’s my laptop or my cellphone, and now we’re going to call through the Teams platform.
One of the other nice little perks is as new people join the team, at one point, you had to worry about putting a new contact in your phone somehow getting their cell phone number. Now I can contact those people immediately using the Teams platform, because we get them set up on it right away. So my point there, because that’s not necessarily unique to Teams. But I think a lot of orgs that are using Teams have found that to be kind of a powerful blend of those different functions. It kind of in many ways functions as a phone system. Even though we may not be thinking of it that way, it is the internal phone system for us in many ways. We do have a classic phone system that we use for our help desk, because it has call center functionality, and that’s what we’ve built on.
But really, the right sizing of a system is kind of the main theme that we want to talk about here. So, Microsoft 365 Business Voice or Teams Voice. That is a particular product that Microsoft announced. You may have heard this name being announced recently in that it’s something that was released in April. Well, Microsoft has had voice calling for a while and obviously, we just talked about I’m already using it for voice. So what’s the difference?
Really, what we’re talking about here is adding the capability on their platform. And previously it was with Skype for Business. Now it’s with Teams to tie the PSTN network, external phone calls into Teams. So in many ways, for me, a lot of external calls I’m doing through Teams as well, because a lot of it’s pre scheduled meetings, or maybe it’s with somebody else sending me meetings from WebEx or Zoom or whatever the case may be. I personally found that a lot of my just actual calls have gone way down. Actually dialing and phone number is significantly less. Most of the time if I reach out to a vendor or something they say, Here’s an invite. Join us on this meeting.”
Intro to Teams Voice
So Microsoft 365 Business Voice or Microsoft Teams Voice, what changed with that is it’s kind of a bundle of licenses. It was previously something that could only be applied to the enterprise business plans. Now it can be applied to any of the Office 365 plans. And previously, we talked about the fact that you have this separate phone system, separate phone service. Now you can call from any device. You want unified communications in every app with this platform. And the idea here is that since we’re already using Teams, or we’re thinking about using Teams, really having a unifying experience can be a powerful thing.
And what’s kind of unique about Teams Voice is the fact that it can be very inclusive. And so what I mean by that is if I’m looking at really any other cloud calling platform, and let’s say I have my phone system now, and everybody has a desk phone, and then let’s say, I have 100 people, and then I move 50 of them to this other cloud phone system. Well, I’ve created a separation between them. Only those 50 people have that system. The other 50 people, they aren’t in that world. So they have to contact the people, the other 50, the have and the have nots, they need to contact them through other means.
And if you’re already using Teams or you’re thinking about using Teams, and you’re using that for the internal calling function, when you look at adding Business Voice, really you can right size it. So you can just give that external calling capability to the people that need it. So again, the fact that we’re using it for whether it’s on my cellphone, or if it’s on my desk phone, or sorry, it’s on my laptop, it really can be a way for me to interact with external calls. I can make external calls. We’ll kind of go into the interface and show that. You can also have a desk phone as well. There are different models and desk phones that are designed to work with Microsoft Teams. And really, from a functionality standpoint, they have a wide array of features that are often needed. Really, you’re looking at things like the standard set of features that people need from a phone system, whether it’s transferring calls and Auto Attendant.
Well, there’s some unique features of that as well that we’ll go into, having call parking, all of these other things. It’s something that is meeting the needs of what I’d say like 95% of the businesses out there. There’s a lot of businesses out there that may have specialized functionality. They’re using some system that’s way more capable than what they need. And a lot of cloud calling systems have a more simplified feature set. But the reality is it works for the vast majority of what people need. You can port your numbers to these systems, you can port your numbers to Teams Voice, and you have integrated contacts as well.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah. The other device that we don’t really touch on too much today is also the Teams Room Systems, so bringing audio and video calling into a conference room space or a meeting room space really highlights that unified communications platform. In the past, you might have separate apps for the soft phone and then have a different instant message client, a desk phone on your desk, and then a different meeting room system and now, Microsoft 365 Business Voice really brings all of those together into one platform.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, I think it’s a really key point. And part of it is also around making it easy to use. I’ve developed kind of a passion for the user experience, because ultimately, the success of a technology platform is often very dependent on how easy is it for people to get to what they need to, how intuitive is it, and workflows matter. We can say, “Well, people are lazy.”, but the reality is, we all try to be efficient. And if I have to take 10 steps to do something that previously took me two steps, then I’m going to hesitate to do that subconsciously. So really having a good user experience where things tie together and it just makes sense is really, really important.
So we’re going to go into kind of a demo, talk about the interface and kind of what it looks like, what it changes if you add Business Voice. Blaine, I’m going to largely turn it over to you, but I’ll ask some questions along the way. So we have some hardware here. Can you tell us what this is all about, what we’re going to go over?
Demo of Teams Voice on Desktop, Mobile and Desk Phone
Blaine Courts:
Yeah. So I’m going to start with talking about the classic Teams desktop app with Teams Voice activated. It’s on a web version or a computer. I’ll also show you the mobile app, what that looks like. I think really the thing that’s maybe surprising to some people about when you add the phone system functionality is the app really doesn’t look any different. It’s basically just adding that functionality to be able to place external calls. I’m going to also have it operate as a phone system with queues and auto attendance and kind of things you’re used to seeing in a phone system.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good point that if you look at the interface now of Teams, you’ll have a call section there now in the vast majority of cases, so if you’re using the desktop app or on your phone, in a web browser, there’ll be those tabs in the left side. We have activity and chat and teams and calendar and files. Typically, you’ll have a call section and that’s where you can see the calls that you’re making without this in place. So really, this just changes that to some degree, right?
Blaine Courts:
Correct. Yep. So here I’ve got a demo tenant setup with two staff members, Alex and Megan. I’ll primarily be using Alex’s account to do the testing. So here I have the Teams web app, which also looks very similar to the desktop app. The Calls menu will be there even if you don’t have Business Voice enabled. However, once you enable those features, you’ll get a little bit more information here than you had before.
So notice there’s a dial pad, right?
Adam Devereaux:
Yep.
Blaine Courts:
So the dial pad is a big difference. You’ll see it shows me what my direct dial number is right there. This functions just like a normal dial pad. I can punch in a number and call it. I get a screen very similar then to if you’re doing an internal Teams call. And then also under the Calls menu, you’ll see a lot of the common things such as contacts, your call history, so who you’ve placed calls to or received them from. And also, Visual Voicemail. So one cool thing about this is it does attempt to transcribe the voicemail, sometimes with hilarious results, but usually it’s relatively close so you can get the feel of what the message was.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, I just want to note, the vast majority of time when I’m talking to somebody on the phone and tell them I’m from Worksighted, they want to spell it that way. Nobody’s mind goes to S-I-G-H-T, unfortunately. So I can’t blame Microsoft for that one.
Blaine Courts:
Yep, so those are the primary differences in the desktop and web apps after you have calling enabled. You can add contacts. So if you’re always calling UPS or other vendors or customers, you can add those here. This does synchronize with Office 365. So it’s the same contact book that you see in Outlook or anywhere else. So you don’t have to maintain a separate contact list or phone directory for the phone system, which is pretty nice.
Adam Devereaux:
I know I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get that to synchronize with other phone systems. So it’s nice that it’s built that way from the beginning.
Blaine Courts:
Definitely. I will just place an inbound call through Teams Voice so you can see what that looks like.
Adam Devereaux:
And so how would I interact with this audio wise? If I place a call through my web browser, what does that mean for me in terms of how I can hear them, they can hear me?
Blaine Courts:
Yeah. So by default, we’ll just use the microphone and speakers and camera if you have one that’s built into the device. So if that’s a laptop, whether it’s a Windows device, a Mac and then same thing with a web browser can use those same devices.
Adam Devereaux:
Okay, so like if I was doing a web meeting?
Blaine Courts:
Yeah, exactly. You can also step it up a notch if you want better audio quality or if you’re using this for lots of calls. You can add a headset, a wired headset, a wireless headset. That’s what our entire support team does.
Adam Devereaux:
Like a gaming headset even?
Blaine Courts:
Yep, yeah. A lot of people don’t necessarily know that if you have like Apple, older pair of Apple earbuds or a lot of other earbuds that most of them can just plug right into your laptop audio port and will work with both microphone and audio, just the way that it would on a cellphone.
Adam Devereaux:
Yep. Sure.
Blaine Courts:
Assuming you don’t have one that has a lightning plug.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah.
Blaine Courts:
So yeah, placing calls is pretty easy through Teams. It looks very similar if you’ve used this at all to do internal video and audio calling. Just the main difference is you can get calls from other people outside your organization. We can move on to the… So I also have a phone here with the Teams app on mobile. Let me just pull this up a minute.
Adam Devereaux:
This is the tech demo part of our webinar. What is your phone number?
Blaine Courts:
Right there if you want to try calling it. All right, there we go. So you should be able to see my iPhone screen here.
Adam Devereaux:
So I see there’s just the Teams app, right?
Blaine Courts:
Correct. Yep. So yeah, this is just the normal Teams app that you might already be using so it’s got all the normal stuff like chat with coworkers, all your different teams in here that you might be using. You’ll see I’m getting a phone call here through Teams Voice from somebody so I can go ahead and accept that. It does look very similar to any other call you might get on your iPhone, which is really nice that it all seamlessly integrates with the device. You don’t have to worry about having the app open. It just sits there in the background and if you get a call pops up and lets you answer it.
Adam Devereaux:
I will say push notifications have been a challenge with cellphones in the past. It’s something that has been a major limitation with a lot of apps, where it’s like well, it works when I call out, then when people call me, it doesn’t always ring and I just get this call notification down the road. I would say for me, the Teams app on my phone generally is pretty reliable when people are calling me even if I don’t have that. It seems like it’s gotten quite a bit better. But it does help that you’re in the app a lot.
So this is again, part of the fact that it’s a little bit different, because I’m using Teams for other functions. So because I’m using that app a lot, that tends to make push notifications, which is what a phone call is, it’s a push to your phone. It seems to work a lot more reliably if you’re using the app periodically throughout the day.
Blaine Courts:
Yep, for sure. Yes, you’ll see the mobile Teams app looks very similar to the desktop app. Once Teams Voice hase been activated, a dial pad will show up. I have my recent call history here. I also have voicemail with the same transcriptions there. It does integrate with your cellular phone contact lists. So I can pull up my list of contacts there and call any of those people from the Teams app. So it will also include any work contacts. So if you’ve got that, your work email on your phone with the contacts, you can search all those there and pull them up. And again, it does have a normal dial pad so it places phone calls, just like you’d expect a phone to do.
Adam Devereaux:
So it seems pretty straightforward from the user standpoint, right? It’s just a modification to their existing phone system, their Teams system, and when he pulls up Megan here, it has that call icon. But because she’s a Teams user, by default, it’s going to ring through to her Teams app, right?
Blaine Courts:
Correct.
Adam Devereaux:
You could call her cell phone from within this, but because of the fact that it bridges both the Teams internal calling and external calling, depending on how you’re configured with the PSTN calls, that’s really where we think a lot of the power comes from here because it’s not a separate system. And that kind of goes back to the admin side of things as well, which we’ll kind of go into a little bit. You’re not having to manage a separate system, a separate interface, creating users, creating extensions, resetting PINs, all those things in a separate system. It’s all part of the Teams admin interface. Is there anything else you wanted to cover on the user side of things? I think you have some handsets here as well.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah, so we do have a couple handsets up here that work with Teams Voice. So we have a Yealink T55, which is more of an entry level Teams handset. And then we have the Yealink T58. This one also can be configured with a camera. So if you want to use it for full video conferencing, whether that’s handset to handset or to a laptop, joining in conference calls, you can add that to many of these handsets.
Adam Devereaux:
So if I have a desktop at my office, and I have this on my desk, I can join Teams video meetings with this just like I could if I had a laptop with a webcam?
Blaine Courts:
Yep, absolutely. So let me see if I can get this part of the demo to work correctly.
Adam Devereaux:
So some of these models as well, so Yealink is not the only manufacturer that’s out there. It’s one that we find has a good price value kind of compromise, but I would say they’re pretty premium out there in that space. But Poly is another large manufacturer that has Teams Voice compatible phones as well.
Blaine Courts:
Yep. So here, I’ve got a screen capture of this Yealink phone pulled up. So the first thing you’ll see is the interface does look very similar to the Teams app on mobile and Teams app on desktop. Again, that’s one of the things that I think makes us really user friendly is the interface is consistent across devices.
Adam Devereaux:
So it’s a touchscreen.
Blaine Courts:
Yep. It’s not a live video feed of the phone so you won’t see the scrolling and things that Adam’s doing right now.
Adam Devereaux:
So see we have a dial pad on the left. We’ve got our missed calls here. I can see favorite numbers if I want those. And then also calendar. So I’ll open that up a minute here.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah. So, again, this does sync with Office 365. So if you had scheduled Teams meetings, you can join those right from the phone, super easy. You don’t have to go find a dial in number or conference ID or something to join. You can just click the Join button right here.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, I would say it’s funny, these little things in Teams Voice can make a big difference. But one of the things from using Teams from an internal meeting standpoint that I found a lot of people, especially executives, find useful is the fact that you can just go to your calendar, hit the Join button, basically one click, two clicks, you’re in the meeting, versus kind of the experience of having to go into your calendar invite and finding the Join link or finding the call and number and all those things. So the fact that you just bring that join right into this interface is fantastic. And then there’s the voicemail tab.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah. So voicemail again. You get the same transcription there and visual voicemail.
Adam Devereaux:
Great. So I can go into the contacts, I could call him back. I can delete the voicemail, all those things. So that’s awesome.
Blaine Courts:
Yep. Another cool thing is it does integrate with Teams for Presence. So Presence is showing the status of your co-workers, whether they’re available, busy, things like that or maybe a way. So you can control all that from the desk phone as well.
Adam Devereaux:
That’s great.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah, and then again, it works basically like a normal phone. So you can you tap a recent number and call it and it will place a call, again, very similar interface to the other Teams apps, which is nice. Let’s go and hang that up.
Adam Devereaux:
And so what is the search here? I hit that.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah. So it does have a search functionality. So if you’re looking for a co-worker to call, I think actually I’m in there or Megan would be one. You can search whoever you want to call and it will pull that right up.
Adam Devereaux:
You’ll see that works pretty well, because since it’s touchscreen, it actually feels a lot like working with a large smartphone really.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah. So it’s nice.
Adam Devereaux:
It has a really cool feature. You see her information, her email, and then hit the call button if I want to call her. And so again, that’s using the Teams Voice app in this case, so it’s going to ring her if she’s using Teams on her laptop, if she’s using it on her desktop, if she’s using it on a mobile phone, if she has a desk phone, it spans all of those use cases. So there really is no differentiation between somebody who’s working from home or somebody who’s working in the office. What if I wanted to bring my desk phone home with me?
Blaine Courts:
You can absolutely do that. So these phones work almost anywhere. As long as you’re not on any crazy filtering or restrictive network configuration at that location, it’s going to work just fine. So I actually set this up at my house last night and it worked just the same as it is when we’re back in the office now.
Adam Devereaux:
Some of these questions that I’m asking are actual questions we’ve received or heard or have commonly come up. And another one is, what hardware do I need in the building?
Blaine Courts:
Yeah, you don’t really need any hardware to get started on Teams Voice. It’s completely cloud based. So you don’t need any voice routers or servers or anything like that in your office to make this work.
Adam Devereaux:
And the phone service provider like PRI trunk? Do I need to get something like that?
Blaine Courts:
Yeah. So you can do all that through Microsoft as well. So you don’t have to worry about another vendor to manage, another bill to get from a different vendor. It’s all one company to go to for your email, voice, all of that, which is nice. The other thing too, without having any hardware, you can avoid a lot of those yearly maintenance costs, support contracts, warranties. All that kind of expense that you might have during the year goes away when you move into the cloud.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, another thing too is that you can actually manage this with an MDM platform using Microsoft Endpoint Manager. They’re Android based devices. And so these, if you have your tenant configured the correct way, they will actually auto enroll in Endpoint Manager. And you can manage them through that interface as well, which is pretty slick.
I think one key point that I want to talk about here is about the reliability, so questions like what kind of internet connection do I need? The reality is if you’re using Teams now for audio calls, for voice calls, for video calls, you can use it for PSTN calls. In fact, if I’m making a call through Teams to a phone number, or somebody’s calling me via my phone number on Teams, or via the main number and it gets transferred to me, that’s the smallest amount of bandwidth of any sort of Teams thing I can do for the most part, like if I’m on a video call with you, I’m literally using tens of times more bandwidth at that point.
So if we look at the resiliency or reliability, the kind of the old way was reliability. We tried to make the system bulletproof. We tried to make sure that it never failed. And the reality was that was impossible to get to. You just try to minimize the failure. The mentality when you start looking at kind of cloud architecture is more of resiliency and recoverability. And what I mean by that is, let’s say that my internet connection goes down in the office, I’m in the office. I’m using Teams on my laptop, I’ve got my desk phone, I’ve got my cellphone. I’m using Teams on all of them. And the internet connection goes down in the building. I can just turn off the WiFi on my cell phone and I’m back up and running with Teams and Teams voice calling through my cell connection, assuming I’ve got a good enough signal.
So it’s just like a lot of other apps that we use. It is dependent ultimately on the quality of your internet connection, the network connection that you have. If you have a poor signal through your cellphone provider, just like you have issues with any other voice function for the most part, it’s not going to necessarily work well. But I will say it’s pretty good. It’s good at handling network drops, good at handling some lost packet type situations. They’ve changed the codec recently. There’s some interesting info on there. And they can handle up to 30% packet loss with still decent audio quality. If I walk out of the building and I drop the WiFi and I’m on a call, it will pause for a second or two, but it will just reconnect me automatically to that call.
So that’s kind of the example of resiliency, that in the real world, there are going to be failures. But it’s extremely robust in terms of how we can access it, where it can access it, and from what I can access it. It’s not that they never go down or there’s never issues. It’s just in totality, it’s less, and it gives you a lot more capabilities. Do you want to pull up the admin interface?
Blaine Courts:
Yeah. So the Teams Voice admin interface looks very similar to any other Office 365 admin portal.
Adam Devereaux:
And how can people get to that?
Blaine Courts:
Yeah, so if you’re signed in Office 365 as an administrator, down here, there will be a portal for Teams Voice.
Adam Devereaux:
So you click Show All.
Blaine Courts:
Oh, yep, you’d have to click Show All first, and then the Teams option is down here. So once you launch that, you get the Teams admin portal. This is also where you’d set up things. So if you’re using this for conferencing or just Teams in general, all those settings are also in here.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, which is really kind of a powerful thing. So you got devices, users, meetings, voice.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah, I think one of the really nice things about this is with easy user provisioning. So you’re already in Office 365 to set up the user for email, and maybe OneDrive and SharePoint and everything else that you’re using. Really, all you have to do is add one more license and then they’re available for phone system as well. So it’s super easy to provision a new user. It’s also very easy to add phone numbers. So sometimes in the past, that can be a big hassle or you have to go to your telecom provider and order new phone numbers. And then maybe have somebody configure those on the system. Here, you can just very easily search for new numbers and add them.
Adam Devereaux:
And from all over the country. That’s the other advantage here is a lot of times if you are trying to add phone numbers from a specific locale, that’s been a pain point in the past. In some cases, certain providers can’t even provide you those. So from within here, you can pick exactly where you want that phone number to be from.
Blaine Courts:
Yep. So I actually created a user yesterday. So you should be under here. So I assigned the voice license, and then I showed up over here. If I want to assign myself a phone number, I can actually do that under phone numbers.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, your voice there, too.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah. So if we go under phone numbers, I want to assign myself a phone number so I can make calls, I can just edit that number, and then assign it to a new user. If I didn’t have any numbers left, I could very easily click Add and then it lets you put in some information about your location and what area code and things like that that you want.
Adam Devereaux:
And another key thing there too, that’s important is you can see that there’s the emergency location. So it does support a lot of teams, or sorry, emergency location routing logic, you can have basically a 911 capabilities where even it can be set up to show a 911 call from somebody’s home address. So it gives you a lot of robust capabilities to make sure that when your users call 911, that they get the correct information as to where that call is coming from.
Blaine Courts:
Absolutely. So the other couple cool features in here, features that are really easy to configure and use, one of them would be auto attendance,. So auto attendance might be something you have on your main number, basically answers the call and gives you maybe a list of menu options to choose from. We’ll walk through an example when I created, so you can define operators in here, if you have multiple time zones you need to support, you can do that. It does support multiple languages.
Blaine Courts:
One really cool thing about this is usually with auto tendencies, you have to get somebody to record the message. And every time that message changes, whether it’s just for one day or ongoing, you have to get the same person to do it, or maybe you hire a voice, another company to do it, yep. One really cool thing about this is you can actually just type in the message that you want, and it will read it out in a pretty natural sounding voice, which is really cool. So it makes it very easy to update these, change them around as you need. It does also support some features so you can have inflection and stuff in there where it will pause and things like that. It’s not a very robotic voice.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, and that actually kind of gets to the heart of a larger topic, which is a larger aspect of the Microsoft 365 platform, which is Microsoft’s AI technologies, cloud AI technologies. So a lot of people throw AI out there as a buzzword. But in the realm of AI development, there’s probably, if I look at the big three, big five, Microsoft is in there in terms of R&D spending. I mean, they spent over $16 billion last year on research and development, and a good chunk of that went towards AI. So they have a really big vision of using AI to help people with business tasks, with business needs. And this is one way that they’re using that platform of using an AI natural speech engine in order to create that. And so there’s lots more ways that that ties into other things in the platform. We’re going to continue to see that develop more, because you’re going to get access to those new features as they come out. You don’t have to upgrade the phone system. You don’t have to roll out a new version. You’re on the platform. Yes, it’s a subscription and you’re going to continue to get those new features as they come out.
Blaine Courts:
So also on the admin portal, it has all the normal phone system features like call queues, ring groups, shared lines. There’s a slide up earlier that had a list of some of just all the features that it does support, also easily configurable through this portal are e-911. So identifying where emergency calls come from. There’s a feature called direct routing, which lets you integrate it with other systems, maybe have analog devices, or contact center, things like that. So it does expand basically what it can do.
Adam Devereaux:
A little more advanced functionality, and that does allow you to do things like have a staggered rollout where you can actually connect Teams Voice to an existing phone system if you’re talking about a larger organization, and then roll it out department by department. Are there any things that you think are kind of cons or things that people should know that features aren’t there? Or if they need certain things that may not be a great fit for them?
Blaine Courts:
Yeah, that’s something we’d want to talk through the company how you’re using your phones currently, to find out if some of those limitations are deal breakers or if there’s maybe other ways to accomplish the same thing. One example would be side cars. So expansion module that goes on to the side of the phone. There really aren’t any Teams supported devices that have that right now just because it is so easy to quickly search for users or pull up a contact list and see everybody’s status and call people. And all cases are actually you almost never need to even know somebody’s extension number. You just need to know their name, their name to be able to call them or do that.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, I think that’s a good point that a lot of companies don’t. They shouldn’t approach getting a new phone system from the perspective of exactly what you have now, because in my experience, most of the time you don’t use all of what you have now. And a lot of times the overall use is significantly less than what people expect.
Licensing Options
Adam Devereaux:
All right, so we’re wrapping up here, I think one of the big things to talk about would be the licensing and how that works. What’s the cost of the system?
So I mentioned earlier that there’s specifically Microsoft 365 Business Voice. This is the new plan. It’s an all in one plan. It’s $20 per user for the whole thing. So the way that that works is that you have a per user 3,000 minutes that gets added per month, and that goes into a large pool. So if you have 10 users, now you’ve got 30,000 minutes. And that also adds the dial in audio conferencing.
So some of you may already have this, where you pay $4 per user to give a phone number when they they send an invite out, a Teams meeting invite, so like for myself, I have that on my account, if I send a meeting invite out to people via email, not only do they have that join Teams meeting but there’s a phone number and conference number. That’s included in this. So you don’t have to have that $4 standalone anymore. That’s part of the $20. There are optional add ons for international minute packs and for toll free calling. But really, it’s all the features at that $20 flat rate in the UCaaS world.
Adam Devereaux:
I mean, I think that you see prices kind of all over the place, depending on types of phones and types of extensions. So this is all in oftentimes comparable to things like the $25 to $35 license costs. So I think it’s very competitive in the cloud calling world. Now it is a bit of a shift from like well, I’ve got this phone system and I pay maintenance and support on it. But a lot of times what people don’t consider is again, you don’t have to have your existing phone service. So people may be paying $400, $800, $1,000 or more for the monthly phone service, that goes away and is a part of this as well.
So really, that kind of wraps up. If anyone has any questions, we’re kind of getting into the Q&A section. One other thing that I want to talk about is that there is a trial available. So if you’re in Office 365, or if you aren’t, and you want to get a demo of what Office 365, Microsoft 365, and Teams Voice calling is all about, you can set up a demo. So there’s two things right now from a trial standpoint. They do have, I believe, it’s only through the end of the month, you can get six months of E-1 licensing free. This was kind of a COVID-19 offer that Microsoft had, so that E-1, that allows you to have hundreds of users potentially licensed in Office 365, net new licenses, net new people. But there’s also a 30 day Teams Voice trial, so we can add that Microsoft 365 Business Voice trial to your tenant, free of charge up to 25 users. So that’s pretty cool offer to be able to get first hand experience with it.
Blaine Courts:
It’s fully functional too. So you get phone numbers. You can add direct dial numbers, auto attendance, that basically runs as a full whole phone system, which is really cool. So if you decide to continue on with it, you can even keep those maybe test phone numbers you had or things like that.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, it’s really just a matter of adding the license once you’re ready to turn it on to the specific users that you want. So you can go find more info on that, worksighted.com/teams-voice. And then let’s turn to our moderators to find out if we have any Q&A questions we want to answer here.
Q&A from the Audience
Rebecca Zaagman:
All right, Rebecca Zaagman here. We have had a ton of questions come in, but it looks like Matt Maines has been doing a great job behind the scenes answering them. I did have one about reliability if we’ve seen the system go down at all. Can you speak a little bit to reliability of Microsoft Teams Voice?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, so I think there was an issue a couple months ago in Europe where there was an outage. I haven’t seen any outages in the U.S. really since we’ve had some clients transferred to it. So as far as core functionality, there have been some things like, as of March, April, some of the provisioning in Teams, and Microsoft issued a lot of notices on this, certain things like if you gave somebody a voice license, it might take 24 to 36 hours for that to really fully provision. That seems to be much quicker now in the last few weeks. They really had a massive flood of adoption of the Teams platform.
Adam Devereaux:
If you look at many, many organizations out there that were just starting to use Teams, you’ve got the usage reports, you can see in the admin center, and oftentimes it’s like these low little lines and all of a sudden, March, April, it’s just thousands of text messages, calls, meetings, et cetera, et cetera. So I would say overall, it’s important to understand that Microsoft has been doing telephony for years. So this is really built on a newer iteration of all the experience they had with Skype for Business calling. So overall, it’s a very reliable, robust platform. And it’s something that they’re continuing to invest a lot of money into. And it’s a big area of growth for them. So I would say overall, I would rank it up there with really any other cloud based phone system. It’s not that there will never be problems with it. But in totality, typically it will be more reliable than you managing your own system.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Great, a couple questions about the add ons for licensing for Teams Voice. Question about international calls with the license, as well as if there’s additional licensing costs for meeting rooms or other rooms where you have phones.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, so there are a couple different license levels. That’s a really good question, the previous one as well too. There is an $8 common room phone license, you do have to add calling plan on to that. So ultimately, depending on how you’re using it, if it’s just internal or making, receiving phone calls, it could be up to really $20 in total, but you don’t have to have any other Office 365 license for that. So you don’t have to have like a separate E-1 or Microsoft business license. It’s a standalone thing. So you can have a lobby room phone, you can have a break room phone or a shop phone, whatever those are, those are separate license, and Teams room phone licenses as well.
So if you get a Teams room system, which we will have an upcoming webinar on those as well, there’s a lot of great systems that are out there. And I’m pretty passionate about it, because I think these systems are really kind of a culmination of a vision for how these rooms should work for a long time. But that’s a $15 license for that phone system, that room system. So you don’t have to have the hardware but then the ongoing license cost for that is $15. And that’s kind of all in cost for that as well, which is very competitive compared to a lot of other teams or room systems out there.
And then international, the way that it works for Microsoft 365 Business Voice is you can add international minutes, so what they call PSTN credits, and I believe those credits vary based on where they’re calling, typical with a lot of international calling. You can add, I think it’s like unlimited international calling. It’s quite expensive if I’m correct. But you can add that to specific people. So if you had a user in your environment that was calling international all day long, you can add the international calling to them, and ultimately probably save a lot of money.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah, I think it’s a pool of minutes similar to the domestic calling plans. So if you had multiple people with that plan too, it would be a pool of minutes that they can share. Otherwise, you can, like you said, buy just minutes as needed, and just pay for those without a plan as well.
Adam Devereaux:
Yep. Great.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Using Teams Voice, can you transfer calls to another user from the main calling line?
Adam Devereaux:
Yes.
Rebecca Zaagman:
How do you figure out the price per minute for each company?
Adam Devereaux:
So there is no price per minute. The way that it works, if you had a small number of users, so let’s say again, it’s 3,000 minutes that you get towards that pool per user that’s licensed. So even some of the heaviest call environments that I’ve worked with, going over 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 minutes is extremely rare. So even if you have 10 users, you’re already at 30,000 minutes, 20, 60,000, you’re quickly in 200,000 plus minutes. So it’s effectively unlimited for most, the vast majority of businesses out there. If the reality is you don’t have enough users, and you’re going over that, you can buy communication credits.
Adam Devereaux:
I don’t know the per minute rate on that offhand, mostly because it’s not really a scenario that we’ve run into people needing previously. But if you aren’t really dealing with this type of a system in a super high volume, that’s when we’d probably look at some of the advanced options with direct routing providers that are out there maybe a better fit for you. So there are ways that you can have a more advanced version, using direct routing peers and things like that. But for the majority of businesses using the all in one bundle at $20 is definitely the way to go. Good question.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Can a client text to a team DID number?
Adam Devereaux:
No. That is one other limitation, another good question. There are some UCaaS systems that are out there, which I’ve said that before. It stands for Unified Communication as a Service, although I think a lot of providers have thrown that around, even if they don’t really qualify as Unified Communication, because technically they had chat and presence and these other things, but nobody used that part of the platform. So that is not something they support. I know that it’s an area of open development. There are ways that you can add SMS calling into Teams, but it’s a separate number. So if you’re giving a DID to users, they can’t receive or text from that at this time. Another good question.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Adding the desk phone for Teams Voice is a one time cost, correct? No additional per month fees?
Adam Devereaux:
It’s just the cost for the hardware, yep. So the T55A, do you have a ballpark price that you’d say on that one?
Blaine Courts:
I can look it up in a minute.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, we’ll get those. There’s a couple different models, again, different manufacturers that are out there. They’re very comparable to other desktop phones that you would get for any other phone system. I would say that they don’t necessarily have the lowest end phones. In some systems, you can get like the three line black and white, super cheap phone. So the lower end ones aren’t as readily available. But yes, you just have to buy the hardware. And the way that that works is you literally just sign into it. So you sign into it, just like you would sign into Teams on any other device. So provisioning that phone is just a matter of signing into it as that user.
Blaine Courts:
Yeah, it’s very easy. I forgot to cover that during the Teams Voice demo section. But the devices are managed right in the same admin portal. So firmware updates, software updates are all handled through there. You don’t have to worry about that. Also, provisioning is super easy. I was up and running within about five minutes when I set these up. I just plugged it in, signed in with my user account and then installed some updates. It was good to go.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, so that’s essentially hot desking, for those of you that are familiar with that term or worked with systems in the past. It allows you to have a single phone, like a hot desk, like maybe a jump station. Multiple people can use that resource and sign into it. So if we look at kind of the future, again of this remote work environment, there’s I think going to be a lot more of that, where people are more into a hybrid world where people are maybe working from home some days, coming into the office. And that’s kind of a perfect use case for that.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Just make sure to sanitize between uses. We have a couple of questions on hunt groups or ring groups. Can Teams Voice support those?
Adam Devereaux:
It does.
Blaine Courts:
Yes, it does support.
Adam Devereaux:
Does it give you the same options as with queues?
Blaine Courts:
So with queues, you can do different patterns. So if you wanted to broadcast to a whole group of people at the same time, you can also do circular hunting. And there’s a third option, I believe, will do the who’s been on a call the least or last.
Adam Devereaux:
So yeah, there’s a couple different routing algorithms that you can use in Teams Voice. I think it’s pretty comparable to a lot of other ones in terms of what most people need from simultaneous ring, ring group call queue capability.
Adam Devereaux:
What I would say is that as far as advanced call center capabilities, it doesn’t have that built in. But again, with direct routing, there are some hosted call center systems that you can basically connect it into, and that’s I think, kind of a future of a lot of systems that we see is that you have specialized functionality, call center functionality, we often want CRM integration. So there’s some really top tier providers out there that do peer into Teams, and so you can use it for that functionality. But in my experience, based on the capabilities, you really just need really basic call queue or ring group capabilities for most businesses. You have that IVR, press one for support, two for sales, three for finance, things along those lines. And then let’s say you hit that finance button, and then three people’s phones ring. That’s kind of the exact use case that it does support.
Blaine Courts:
Yep, it also does support group call pickup. So if you’re using that functionality now, it also does support that.
Adam Devereaux:
And shared line appearance as well where basically, you can have like a single line appearance and then that can ring to multiple phones at the same time.
Blaine Courts:
So I do have an approximate price of the T55A. It’s around $190. This is a T58. I actually don’t have that one in front of me but the T56 is basically the same exact form factor, but I don’t believe it supports video as an add on, might be one other difference.
Adam Devereaux:
It doesn’t have built in Bluetooth. So the other thing is the 58 does have built in Bluetooth so your AirPods, your Bluetooth headset, any Bluetooth device like that, you can natively pair with this and use with that desk phone.
Blaine Courts:
Yep. So the T56 is around 230. And then the T58 would be a little bit more than that.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Great. We still have questions flooding in. Do you have to pay for extra voicemail boxes where you route calls to in Teams Voice?
Adam Devereaux:
That’s a good question.
Blaine Courts:
That is a good question. I know you get virtual system licenses that you assign to auto attendance and things like that. I believe you get a certain number based on the number of users you have licensed.
Adam Devereaux:
I have to look at the interface. I believe there’s a way that you can add a resource account that can function as a virtual voicemail, but I don’t know exactly how the delivery function works on that. So that’s a really good question. We’ll have to get back to you on that.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Can you pre-program company vacation times in outgoing voice messages in Teams Voice?
Adam Devereaux:
So it works very similar, where it’s using your status messaging that you’re using based off in your calendar. So it will automatically change your status based on your calendar. But you can flip yourself to busy. As far as your outbound voicemail message, do you know if it supports an ability to have a different voicemail message based on your status?
Blaine Courts:
I think it does let you set one if you set out of the office. As far as the Teams Voice system as a whole, you can set holidays and office hours. So you can have during business hours Auto Attendant and then after hours Auto Attendant or different call routing depending on the time of day. It does also lets you add holidays in there as well.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, I will say as far as around voicemail functionality in Teams Voice, the other nice thing is the fact that you can access that and change that really from wherever you’re at. So again, in the scenario that you’re using Teams for other things, I’ve got it on my laptop, I’ve got it on my phone, it’s really easy for me to make changes to that.
Blaine Courts:
Yep. So to get an answer, more information on the voicemail, so shared voicemail or like a generic voicemail box, from an Auto Attendant, you can specify like a group of people in Office 365 to receive that voicemail and it doesn’t appear that that needs a paid license.
Adam Devereaux:
So it’s kind of an area where oftentimes you don’t necessarily have to have cost for those resource factors, resource accounts that are in there.
Blaine Courts:
Yep.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Looks like there’s a couple other questions about the setup of Auto Attendant in Teams Voice, including can you record or modify hold music, and can you limit voicemail length?
Blaine Courts:
You can upload your own music on hold. And you can specify that at a system wide level and then also if you have different call queues, so if you have people waiting in the queue, you can have different music on hold there. So if you want a promotional messaging or things like that advertising, you could do that as well as customizing normal music on hold.
Adam Devereaux:
And then what was the other part of that?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Can you limit voicemail length in Teams Voice?
Adam Devereaux:
I don’t know. So let’s stump Adam and Blaine on everything now. So we’ll try and answer that a minute while we go on to the next question.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Okay. Actually, that might be the last one.
Adam Devereaux:
All right. Looks like we had a lot of people asking questions in the Q&A, so that’s fantastic.
Blaine Courts:
Matt did a great job of answering them as we went.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, we really want to make sure that this is interactive. Really, the goal for these events is to have an opportunity to kind of engage with you directly about things that we’re getting a lot of questions on, maybe try to answer questions for a lot of people at one time. So this is fantastic. We really appreciate it. So any idea on that?
Blaine Courts:
On the voicemail length?
Adam Devereaux:
Voicemail length?
Blaine Courts:
I’ve not found an answer on that yet.
Adam Devereaux:
Okay. Contact us through the website or shoot one of us an email if you have any questions about getting started with Teams Voice. Blaine is one of the people that you ultimately talk to if you reach out to us about potentially looking at Teams Voice. And so he’s a pretty nice guy. So with that, I think we’re going to wrap up. We will be having another webinar next month, topic to be determined and look forward to seeing you again. Thanks, everyone for joining us. Thanks, Blaine.
Worksighted Team
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