Working with Microsoft Teams

In its standard form, Microsoft Teams enables free audio and video calls between users - using Skype for Business.  It also has impressive conferencing and collaboration features which make it a very appealing product.  Customers clearly like it.

Two frequently asked questions are: “Can we make calls to the outside world from Teams?” and “Can we answer incoming calls to our business from within Teams?”  The answer to both questions is yes, but there is a price to pay.  First, you need to pay Microsoft for an Office 365 Voice Licence at about £10 per month per user.  Then, you need to pay for your calls.

Provided you have bought your Office 365 Voice Licences, we can connect your Teams users to our VoIP platform so that users can make calls to and receive calls from external numbers.  We offer fixed price call bundles as well as flexible pay-per-use tariffs.  If you use Microsoft’s own service to route outgoing calls to external numbers, you will have to pay them another £10 per month per user for an unlimited UK call bundle.

The Office 365 Voice licence gives you access to Microsoft’s own hosted business PBX which provides many (but by no means all) of the call handling features which our VIP VoIP platform provides.

Our view is that it is probably unjustifiably expensive and unnecessarily complicated for most organisations to make outbound calls via Microsoft Teams.  Customers are better off using Teams for what it is good at and using our specialised and lower-cost hosted telephone system to handle calls to and from the outside world.

We can also add value to your Microsoft Teams solution in some interesting ways, such as:

• Injecting messages into a user’s Teams session. For example: “A voicemail message has been left in mailbox 502” or “Your customer service call queue has exceeded the target of 10 people waiting”
• Linking Teams with our LDAP shared telephone directory.

Benefits of combining Microsoft Teams and VIP VoIP

Improves collaboration

You can schedule online meetings, chat to your co-workers and create frictionless communication between staff and customers. There are options to create a private or group chat whilst sharing files and co-authoring content is easy to do.

Countless features

Your business will still have access to all the great features of VIP VoIP hosted switchboard with the added bonus of Microsoft Teams’ features. Receiving, making and transferring calls is just as simple.

Customisation and Integration

Utilising Microsoft Teams with VIP VoIP allows you to have the widest range of app integrations to help support and grow your business.  As always, here at VIP VoIP we pride ourselves on being able to provide customised features for our resellers and their end-users. So if you have something unique in mind, get in touch.