Telephony for Microsoft Teams: What to look for Small and mid-sized business edition

Got Microsoft Teams, but not sure how telephony fits in? No matter your business size, RingCentral is the perfect match to boost your Teams setup for a feature-rich PBX experience. Check out our comprehensive white paper for everything you need to know for completing your Microsoft Teams setup with telephony.

Telephony for Microsoft Teams 101

Congrats! You have Microsoft Teams implemented across your business. That’s no surprise given the number of daily Microsoft Teams users grew from just 20 million to a staggering 145 million year-over-year—a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the acceleration of remote work. But what about telephony for Microsoft Teams? What do you need to know about it? Here’s a quick rundown.

TELEPHONY IS NOT INCLUDED

While Teams includes several collaboration essentials, such as team messaging and video conferencing, telephony isn’t one of them. Teams requires a separate solution to enable external public switched telephone network (PSTN) calls outside of the organization. This presents some critical issues since calling is still one of the most popular communication tools used globally—its omission as a standard feature in Teams leaves your business without a key asset.

Many businesses need telephony integrated natively into their Teams environments. Telephony integration natively allows users to access private branch exchange (PBX) features, such as call control and management, without having to move into other applications or systems—this reduces downtime and application overload and simplifies training and management.

HOW TO ADD TELEPHONY TO TEAMS

Extra licenses and solutions are required to add telephony functionality into Teams. To enable telephony in Teams, each user needs a Microsoft Phone System license, which is available as an add-on license or is bundled into certain Microsoft 365 packages. Secondly, each user needs connectivity to PSTN, which provides phone lines and minutes.