Is MSFT Teams Voice the best fit for your business?
Understand the capabilities and limitations of each carrier.
When looking into moving the phone system to the cloud the first consideration should be to see how you can leverage your existing collaboration tool. Why bring in another vendor if you don’t have to?
If you have MSFT Teams this may seem like a no brainer but there are reasons you may want to look at alternative UCaaS providers that integrate directly into the MSFT Teams platform. Let’s consider why would MSFT, let a UCaaS provider integrate with them? From a business perspective wouldn’t it make financial sense to lock the competition out?
MSFT Teams makes up just 1% of MSFT revenue and the voice service is less than 25% of that 1%. This is not a core technology they are investing in. Voice services is an add-on that completes the Teams solution. Allowing competitors to integrate prevents direct competition where the overall solution may not be the best fit for the customer.
MSFT may appear to be cost effective until you look under the hood. If you have an E5 license the phone app is free, however you still have to purchase a calling plan which has a limited pool of minutes per user and can be expensive compare to today’s marketplace. In addition, all minutes have to be pre-paid, meaning that if you start to run out you need to purchase more otherwise your calls will end similar to the way old pay phones worked.
Oh oh! Real time costs just keep adding up! Prepay too! What!!!
MSFT has most of the basic phone features that customers need, curiously SMS / Texting is not a functionality that is included. In today’s preferred methods of communication this seems to be a significant gap in their portfolio. Less important, but still necessary for most enterprise companies is the ability to fax which is not supported by MSFT Teams.
Oh oh! No texting?! No faxing?! What!!!
MSFT teams has a 99.9 SLA, which allows for almost 9 hours of down time per year. This may be an acceptable amount of time for a messaging platform. However, most people are used to 100% uptime on their voice services and looking for an SLA that is much closer to reflecting this.
Oh oh! 9 hours down time! When will they happen? What!!!
MSFT will require you to manage your own security certificates for each phone. This process can become cumbersome if you have a substantial amount of phones and continue to add new ones over time.
Oh oh! Manage certs for every phone! What!!!
Although MSFT has its limitations when to comes to voice services it doesn’t mean they should be eliminated from your evaluation process. Delivering voice services is complex especially on a global level. Its important to understand the capabilities and limitations of each carrier in order to make the best decision for your organization. If you would like help with the evaluation process feel free to reach out to me for advice.
Get in touch.
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