Services built by Netaxis to complement Teams

Microsoft Teams Direct Routing is fairly big business for us at the moment. Even before the mad corona virus pandemic rush of businesses looking for collaboration and homeworking tools we had been helping our telco and enterprise customers layer services over the base Microsoft Teams offering. 

I thought it might be useful to look at some of the jobs we have undertaken for customers. Our combination of products, APIO the APIU Orchestrator and Session Routing Engine which is also very much API driven have proved invaluable when it comes to interfacing to Microsoft Teams. 

What have we done?

• We have performed migration services to help customers moving from legacy PBX to Teams.
• In the case of hybrid deployments where an existing PBX has been kept in parallel with Teams we can ensure that intra-company calls are kept locally without the need to trombone via the Service Provider Direct Routing trunk.
• In the same vein we have implemented short number calling to allow short dial numbers (123 dials 456) between PBX and Teams.
• Call Forward to allow customers to forward Microsoft Teams calls to mobile for example.
• Automatic call forward to a Disaster Recovery number in case of MS Teams failure to ensure business continuity.
• Mobility allows customers dialled on their mobile  Microsoft Teams client to choose to answer with the Teams mobile app using the data network or their native mobile phone client using voice network.This is very useful in situations where data coverage is poor or expensive isn’t stable or expensive as might be the case when roaming.
• Integration of LDAP server with Teams so that user profiles are managed directly from LDAP.

There are cases where a business might rely solely on Teams functionality and only use a telco for their numbering plan. Others are using services independent of Microsoft even where the same service is available within Teams. With Microsoft you get what you get but a telco will usually be able to provide a bespoke service. It is a fact that whilst a traditional full featured PBX might offer hundreds of features in reality every business will really use a different subset of these features. This is still very much the case when looking at Microsoft Teams.

Looking at projects involving partners and customers we have seen quite a number of hybrid implementations. The European Parliament for example uses both Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex. One customer who was using jabber and Skype For Business now also runs Teams in parallel.

You might ask why businesses, in these cases very large Enterprises, run more than one platform. The answer is likely strategic with big business not wanting to be tied to a single vendor. The Unified Communications world is very fast moving. Vendor and customer roadmaps can diverge or if a vendor changes pricing strategy then all of a sudden having a choice of solution can be very useful.

Whatever the scenario what is certain is that it helps to have a technology partner who is expert and leaders in the space. If you would like to discuss your own Microsoft Teams Direct Routing requirements, be you a service provider looking to enhance your offerings or an enterprise looking for some integration services by all means get in touch using our contact page. As well as our own products we partner with leading Microsoft Certified SBC vendors AudioCodes, Ribbon and Oracle