Skype or Teams (and support for DDIs)

[Bruce123]

Hi,

 

OK, I guess this one must come up quite often.

 

But one of users have said said their team is working from home and can't afford mobile phones out of their budget.

 

Can Skype or Teams be configured to support standard telephone numbers? Not sure if this is for receiving or making calls...

 

We have cloud / SIP telephone system (Avaya), but I don't know if the numbers have to match these.

 

Can MS supply spare DDIs as part of the agreement?

 

Kind Regards,

 

Bruce.

[p858snake]

You need to look at the call planning stuff https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/voice-calling#:~:text=Calling%20in%20Teams%20starts%20with,can%20make%20and%20receive%20calls. I can't speak to what Teams is like as a PABX as we use Skype for Business.

[psydii]

Teams can handle calls. It takes several days to set up (some steps say 'now wait up to 24hrs...') Teams PBX capabilities are quire limited compared to many systems, but very advanced compared to others (seamless conference calling with video? - easy!)

 

You need a phone system licence, and a dial plan licence per user as well as the cloud pbx licence.

You then need to request a block of numbers (or port your existing numbers if you are retiring your previous system).

 

To link Teams ( or Skype for Business) to an existing PBX you need additional licences and usually additional hardware.

 

 

We have basically abandoned our on-prem system and set everyone up in Teams on new numbers. The on-prem system forwards calls to our official main number to the equivalent number in out Teams block. This costs us the price of the call. Inbound numbers to our official (on prem) number have dropped to almost zero as people adopt the new "switchboard" number. We hide everyone behind the switchboard number to protect their time (we don't want to discourage them from running Teams). The reception team receive calls and the transfer them to colleagues as required. Critical colleagues are accessible through menu prompt (auto-attendants) and typically these route to a office365 group (e.g. Finance, Child Protection, Sixth Form, Upper School, Lower School) for which the admin + "head of" are members and they either receive the call or it goes to group email. We have disabled access to voice searching the global address book.

 

If people dial the on-prem DDI for colleague, their legacy desk phone rings until voicemail and then the legacy system emails the message to the user. We didn't redirect these numbers to save costs (and time!)

 

What we have found is that increasingly other organisations are using Teams so the boundary between phone call, teams chat, conference call and meeting have become blurred. 'Phone' calls often escalate into video chats with more than two participants. This has been quite empowering. Done well this allows for rapid decision making, done badly people feel that they are in an endless series meetings.

[Edu-IT]

Isn't it £8 a month or something just for the telephony licence and then you need a call package from a third party? I can see this costing more than a cheap mobile.

[psydii]

Yes you probably can get some mobiles etc cheaper than Teams + PBX etc. But you don't get auto attendants, shared voicemail, call routing, transfers, transcription, or seamless transition to video calls or meetings.

 

You don't need 3rd party call package, there is a 120Min/month package from Microsoft available at a competitive* rate.

 

Also it gets people into Teams. During this time enabling calling through Teams has been the biggest revolution for us. You have the same experience whether you are at your desk, at your kitchen table, in your classroom, or socially distancing in the queue for the post office.

 

*depending on the number of people you need to be able to make calls, and how many minutes you use as an organisation. We do also have A5 as we make heavy use of the Defender/Azure/Microsoft ATP suite of services, AIP Labels and advanced ediscovery, as well as cloudappsecurity (which has been awesome and helping us isolate problems, compromised accounts, and also identify students who's only access in one shared andriod phone between four of them), so the phone system almost comes along for the ride.