6 months in with Teams Voice

Datcom have been using Microsoft Teams Voice for the last 6 months for calls, video and internal messaging. We’ve also been using it for internal documentation, organising meetings and projects, as well as arranging the essential fortnightly office lockdown quiz!

Why the move to Teams and was it easy?

To make our system more resilient, we took the decision to move from a traditional telephone system to the hosted Teams telephony in October 2019. Rather than relying on a hardware-based telephone system, we moved to the internet to allow flexibility and the ability to access calls, messages and video from any device or web browser. It covered or exceeded all our requirements for normal day-to-day operations and also covered our disaster recovery plan, if the office were to become unavailable. Migration was simple (although background configuration was required) and was carried out without disruption to our customer services.

Is it reliable?

As it is internet based, you are dependent on your connection from the office, home or mobile, as well as the system being hosted. We’ve had a couple of outages for short periods of time due to changes made by Microsoft, but overall, the service has been very reliable. The video calls that we use for our managers’ meetings each morning have been very reliable and the quality is good. Telephony features and calls are of good quality with no recognition that the whole system is hosted over the internet in Microsoft’s cloud.

How do I get started with Teams?

You need to have a few things in place to get Teams fully up and running. It mainly revolves around additional licences from Office 365, a calling plan and the necessary hardware for end users, such as headsets and webcams. If you are interested in a Teams setup, we can review what you have and talk you through anything you need.

Does it do the job that you anticipated?

The timing for our migration was really quite fortuitous, as we had this in place several months before the COVID-19 lockdown took hold. This meant we could easily move to working from home without any disruption, and the engineering team could continue supporting all our clients. We use it as our main communications platform and, without it, we couldn’t function as we now do.

As we have got to know the Teams suite better and new features have been added, it has fulfilled all our needs and exceeded our expectations.

Anything that you would want to change?

There are features being added to the Teams system on an almost weekly basis, so a few of the things on our wish list (such as allowing 9 people on a video call at once) have already been added. Development, especially in times like this where demand is high due to the boom in working from home, is being driven on at a fair pace.