Teams as a PBX and External Calls?

[Wirral_Wonderer]

We have an phone system which pre-dates the dinosaurs and are budgeting to replace it.

 

With Teams being integrated into everyday school life, I was wondering what experiences are of other schools who have transitioned to Teams from an inhouse phone system for both internal and external calls?

 

Our new Business Manager has come from a NHS and Medical Charity background and used Skype with headsets so is not afraid of the jump!

[RobFuller]

Licence cost was the biggest issue with this implementation when I did some pre-investigation into phone systems. I need to do some more investigation myself as alternative options for session border controllers as some quote I had back for cloud hosting where crazy expensive.

[mavhc]

What's the point of a pbx if you're paying for every extension? Or worse, every user. That's just back to not having a PBX.

[MatthewL]

Personally I would not integrate within Teams but see plenty doing so, I would either host own PABX with SIP trunks, you will save a fortune, don't necessarily have to have handsets on every desk but you can use softphones or client on mobiles. Ideally if you can have it hosted, only downside is the cost seems to be more but having it on site means you can still have internal calls if you internet goes down.

[mrhall]

Its the cost of IP-phones that puts us off. Our PBX is still working ok, and our support company believe they can still get parts if needed. So we have an internet phone system to the outside world, but PBX and "old" phones (we've recently counted - 130 extensions in active use). So although something like 3CX offers enhanced features - and because that licences for simultaneous calls rather than individual users - this seems an affordable approach EXCEPT the cost of replacing the phones. Some staff could use client on mobiles, and some could be happy with headphones to their desktop computer (though they aren't free either...)

Good to see what others are doing...

[jnfarmer]

We had the same issue at our school, for some reason every single teacher had a phone on their office desk, as well as all desk based support staff, we would never have been able to replace the phone system if we went for that again. We did look at Teams but it was a massive amount of money to do what we needed and also I didn't like the idea of having all our eggs in one basket with M365. However, we went for hosted version of 3CX, staff that really needed a handset for every day use; receptionsists, PAs and CLT got a Yealink T42S and then everyone else got a £30 wired handset. We're paying for it over 5 years, jobs a good'un.

[mavhc]

£30-£40 a phone doesn't seem that much when they last 10 years. How much did you think was a lot?

[jnfarmer]

D'oh! I meant £30 for a wired headset.

[DavR]

We recently re-did ours, and similar situation with handsets. We'd have liked to have gone cloud based, but the cost of replacing every extension was prohibitive. In the end we went for on prem PBX again and mostly reusing existing handsets. Cloud based would have been nice, but the extra features didn't justify the cost.

[HPlum78]

You can integrate your on prem PBX with teams, and you probably dont need any additional licences for your users.

[EddyAllen]

FreePBX and a SIP trunk will be the most cost effective solution. You are looking at around £8 per SIP line per month and FreePBX is, as it says, free. However if you are using a Microsoft Ecosystem and you want to keep things consistent, I think there is quite a lot of value from having a simple system of which you will be paying £9 (using the promo) per month per user. Teams as PBX does have limited features but that cuts down on the time you are going to be spending configuring the thing. FreePBX isn't exactly intuitive and has its quirks but is incredibly flexible and rock solid. In my personal opinion don't even both with the locked down rubbish that BT sell you (Avaya), its about as user-friendly as a space shuttle and costs a similar amount!