Category Archives: Microsoft Teams

“Microsoft 365 Business Voice” extends Dial-tone to Small and Medium Business

21 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by in Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, Teams

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Having found myself in a smaller country and subsequently the home of smaller businesses I have come up against a large show stopper in the past when talking Cloud PBX.

Mobile Phone Teams Dialer

Previously, if you wanted to add Phone System licensing to your users they would need to be licensed as at least E3. This has made adding dial tone to users on Business Essentials or Business Premium a really large jump in licensing cost.

In a nutshell, Microsoft 365 Business Voice is an add-on license that can be added onto Office 365 or Microsoft 365 subscriptions that include Microsoft Teams.

Qualifying plans are:-

Office 365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1, E3, A3, or A3; Microsoft 365 Business, E3, or A3

NOTE No more than 300 users.

Teams Calling.png

Currently Microsoft 365 Business Voice is available in Canada and the UK only, with more countries rolling out soon. New Zealand is rumored for sometime in 2020, keep an eye out for a formal announcement.

You can either purchase your calling plans from Microsoft or make use of a telco of your own choice by means of Teams Direct Routing.

This is great news for the New Zealand market!

Reference https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/business-voice

 

 

Microsoft Teams: connect to meeting services from Zoom and Webex natively

20 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by in Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, Teams

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Yes its true, coming early 2020 Teams will support the “direct guest join” capability. Essentially this simply means that you can join Zoom and Webex meetings from your Teams Room System. Basically clicking the meeting join button joins the participant from the browser based client.

Currently launching the browser to join is suppressed, but as Microsoft have worked closely with both Cisco and Zoom they are now close to releasing this for all to enjoy.

Looking at the details you will see an icon on the meeting entry on your Teams Meeting Room display indicating the meeting type (Teams\Webex\Zoom). If you ever had a play with “QuickLaunch” you may be familiar with this approach.

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The announcement stated that the capability was to be available to a new generation of meeting room devices with embedded web technology. I am rather confidant that it will be available on all the official Teams Meeting Room devices. You can bet that there will be other vendors added to the initial list of supported web based meetings.

This is huge!

Microsoft Teams joins Skype for Business Visio Stencil in V3.0

06 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, Skype for Business Tools, Teams, visio, Visio Stencil

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Its been just over a year since the last release of my Skype for Business Stencil (V2.0). Of course the world changes and over the last 12 months I have added a number of additional images. This includes numerous Teams images as well.

Its not brand new but certainly worthy of bumping to V3.0. Below is a snippet of some of the new images

Visio 3.0

Download HERE