Microsoft Teams - What you need to know
Microsoft Teams is a collaboration app built for hybrid work so you and your team stay informed, organised, and connected — all in one place.
The core of Microsoft Teams is built on a continuous and always accessible Collaboration and Communication framework, that everyone in your organisation can use to work smarter, faster and in a way that keeps everyone engaged.
Powerful audio and video calling
Teams is a robust video conferencing and calling tool, but its capabilities go beyond the expectations from these two critical communication methods. Because Teams is available on every device, Teams is a great way to offer consistent and always available communication and collaboration for a hybrid workforce that transition from the office, to home, on the road, and back again By being a cloud-first platform, no investment for on-premise hardware or virtual machine instances are required, however, Microsoft recognises that customers need to bridge the gap and so, Microsoft offer calling options that allow you to transition to cloud at your own pace, or keep control over communications.
Teams offers tight Microsoft Office integration options
Tightly integrated with the rest of Microsoft 365, users can create and manage Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files within their channels and cross-collaborate with several other Teams and Channels. The modern workforce are enhancing the way they are getting things done and staying productive with Microsoft Power Apps. Allow any user to create a low-code app and share it with their team that will change and reshape the way your workforce does things.
Busy schedules, multiple meetings and content that has to be on-demand, Teams offers the best all-in-one solution as it fits perfectly within the other applications users consume today with Microsoft licencing.
How to connect PSTN to Teams?
PSTN connectivity allows users to make phone calls within Microsoft Teams directly, eliminating the need to have multiple systems to achieve the daily tasks within the day. Calling, Meeting and Collaboration – in a singe application.
This can become a complex task where Bx2 will help you evaluate the 4 different options available. The 4 option are as follows,
- Operator Connect (OC) – Allows you to chose a carrier that is best aligned to your office geographic locations. Microsoft have partnered carriers around the world to allow their customers to bring their preferred carriers directly into their tenant. multiple Operator Connect carriers can be used, depending on your needs, however, Bx2 can evaluate your existing solution and provide you with the best options and Operator Connect partners that suit your business needs and work within your budget.
- Direct Routing – Allows the use of a PSTN carrier that is local to your office and terminates into self-owned and managed systems. Direct routing, however can be hosted with some of our partners and is a fully managed SBC service. Deciding as to whether or not Direct Routing is for your Business? BX2 welcome the opportunity to evaluate your business needs and help with any deployment of Direct Routing, globally.
- Teams Phone Mobile – With Teams Phone Mobile you can enable a users sim card telephone number to co-exist with their Teams PSTN number. When your existing cell carrier participates in the Teams Phone Mobile program, they are able to manage the service for bringing PSTN calling.
- Microsoft Calling Plans – This is the most simple solution but often the most costly option, it is an all in one cloud solution from Microsoft as your PSTN carrier. Currently MS calling pans are only available in 32+ countries and is rapidly growing.
With our programmatic approach, Bx2 can save time, money and ongoing support and operational efforts to keep your voice solution current, persistent with the features that matter most, and overall productivity without investing in other platforms and technology.
As part of the Microsoft licencing structure within E3 or E5, phone system can be added on to E3 or needs to be enabled with the rest of the E5 suite of services.
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How Secure is Teams?
Teams offers secure collaboration, both internally and externally.
Teams is secured by design under the Microsoft 365 suite. That includes two-factor authentication, for sign in and access to the rest of the Office 365 resources, as well as encryption in transit and at rest in the cloud. Data in Teams meets and exceeds ISO 27001 standards and holds SOC I and SOC II compliance level achievements. It can be provisioned to meet many strict industry data security standards, such as HIPAA patient data restrictions in healthcare, DoD or Government, for example. As much as there is granular control to lock down Teams in your organisation, there is also capabilities to create frictionless collaboration between other cloud tenants, customers and business you engage with on a regular basis . Your administrator can generate guest accounts for Teams within the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, which is an excellent way to collaborate on calls on channels with clients, business partners, contractors, or any other external stakeholders you want to involve. Administrators can choose what users can share, who they collaborate and meet with and introduce compliance measures.
Greater data visibility and better governance
Teams offers IT leaders visibility and insight into work carried out within their organization. Because all conversations within Teams are persistent, conversations become valuable information available to Microsoft 365’s governance and management tools which can be automated to flag, notify and quarantine any information shared.
Files, conversations and notes in Teams channels are all saved in the Microsoft 365 cloud, making it available to Microsoft Graph – Microsoft 365’s data intelligence center. You can see which channels users are working in the most, and who they engage with, how often and get visibility on organisational cross-collaboration cultures, how they’re conversing, see when work speeds up or slows down, among many, many other things.
Microsoft Teams Rooms Standardisation
Every organisation, big or small should consider or may already have a room standard that will guide IT and service owners toward a predictable, scalable and serviceable meeting room. Having standards for rooms locally and globally, is s strategic win to provide the best possible user experience. With the guidance from Microsoft and our knowledge of meeting rooms can help you define these standards and produce an eco-system that will delight users but also minimize he effort to troubleshoot and maintain meeting room systems.
We typically categorise meetings spaces into Small, Medium, Large, with bespoke spin offs to accommodate Collaboration, Multi-purpose and Executive rooms. By categorising these, each archetype no mater where it is deployed, will have the same technology, features and functionality that is experienced no matter which office location a user is in. documenting and designing these standards are all taken care of with BX2.
How To Manage Teams & MTR
Further to standardisation, having a robust and comprehensive support strategy is key. You need to support the room experience with knowledge and agility. That is why Bx2 highly recommend the use of MTR-Pro licencing. MTR-Pro offers great capability to administrators and support staff to utilise the power of the AI in MTR-pro to diagnose and potentially fix issues, before human intervention is required. Gain deeper insights into issues and more so, get a view on how rooms and technology is performing, with the reporting and analytics it provides.
Bx2 offer upto 8 hours of free consultancy if you sign up today!
Microsoft Teams Certified Contact Centre
Only the best partners are selected to work alongside Microsoft Teams as a contact Center Solution. Depending on your needs, each partner can deliver everything you need to achieve an exceptional customer-facing reputation.
Connect with Customers where they are and on the mediums they are most comfortable with. Build an Omni-Channel Contact Center across multiple platforms and keeping Teams as the central phone system that serves the rest of your workforce.
Customers demand an easy, efficient and competent experience with your organisation and thats why routing interactions to the right agents matters.
You may not be certain if you need a contact center, but consider some of these interactions that may be occurring today with your business:
1. Customer Services
2. Technical Support
3. Billing enquiries
4. Reservations of any kind
5. Offering of Loyalty Programs
Now, you may be receiving and reaching out through traditional channels such as email and phone, but consider that the new generation are all about the Internet of Things and are more connected than ever. With channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Web and text, there is broad accommodation to your customers.
Achieve all of this with our list of contact center partners:
1. AnyWhere365
2. 8×8
3. ComputerTalk
4. Enghouse Interactive
5. Five9
6. Genesys
7. Landis Technologies
8. Luware
9. NICE InContact
10. Tendfor
Microsoft Teams Certified Compliance & Recording - How does it work?
In its native form, Microsoft Teams offers call recording and basic administrative and compliance features, however some of your requirments may need to be fulfilled by Microsoft Teams Certified Partners.
Things like recording archiving features that are tailored to you business needs and protocols that suit the industry your business serves.
You may also require transcriptions and deeper analysis of speech that improve business compliance, or breakthrough the hassle of costly manual tasks.
Most of all though, the partners we work with below are always enhancing and innovating against the industry demand and best practices for call recording and compliance. Bx2 work with these partners to provide our customers with the right solution and a world-class deployment.
Call recording is integrated in the form of a bot. The bot captures or intercepts the media that is sent and received the Teams call and is invited by means of the policies set up. All partners have the same method and framework to achieve call recording.
Microsoft Teams Bots & Apps
Teams has a wide range of bots to automate tasks and bring efficiency to the organisation. These are accessible from the App Store within Teams. Bots can be used to service internal teams with answers, capture feedback from staff or pull in data from external sources, into a Teams Channel. Bx2 recognise the custom requirements that our customers need and we cater for custom development and integrations with other day-to-day and operations tools and software you use.
How BX2 Support Teams Deployments
Our customers are delighted when they know that all the heavy lifting and design throughout the processes is managed by BX2. We fully own the solution, create the standards, and ensure they are deployed according to meet your business requirements that were agreed at the initial assessment and discovery phase. To fully support the environment, BX2 focuses on ensuring as-built drawings, setup documents and any critical information needed to support the estate going forward is delivered when the project closes.
How can Bx2 help?
Bx2 help you decide the best approach to:
- Define success to your desired business goals
- Work against and plan for budgets
- Documentation
- Migration
- Review of current Telco providers
- Cost saving analysis
- Security
- Optimisation and best practices
- Meeting room standardisation
Business Journey Planner
Bx2 deliver:
- Platform configurations
- Low-level designs
- Meeting room deployment
- Enable users for voice
- Configure dial plans
- Auto Attendants
- Call Queues
- Configure meeting and calling policies
- Integrate business workflows