Moving your Telephony to the Cloud with Office 365

Each day, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help our great customers solve their business challenges to achieve more.

Recently, I met with a customer who had an aging phone system and they were looking to upgrade their phone system.  They wanted to minimize on-premise PBX hardware needed and move to a cloud powered solution to provide telephony for their employees.

Solution

I shcloud-telephonyared with them, PSTN Calling in Office 365.  Microsoft provides telephony services from the cloud with Office 365.  This enables customers to provide telephony for their employees from the cloud with no or minimal on-premise infrastructure required

 

 

 

 

add-voice-numbers

This service is currently available in 5 countries:  United States, France, UK, Spain, and Puerto Rico.  Within minutes, you can acquire phone numbers for your employees.  Also, you can port your existing phone numbers to Office 365.

When users are using Office 365 PSTN Calling, they can make phone calls anywhere with Internet access with their Skype For Business client.  If they are in the office, they can make calls and receive phone calls as normal.  In addition, if they are working remotely or on the road, they can make and receive calls to their office phone number.   This is a great business continuity capability.  For example, a while back, the power was out in one of our offices, all our employees worked from home and took their calls from home.  Our customers did not know the difference.  The customers just called our employees and the call was routed to our employee's Skype For Business client.

User can use their Skype For Business client with a variety of headsets.  I have worked with headset manufacturers:  Plantronics, Jabra, and Sennheiser.  Or, if  your users want a telephone handset, I have worked with Polycom, Audiocodes, and Yealink.

vvx-500-lg-a Polycom VVX 500 (here),

 

 

 

440hd-ip-phone_1  Audiocodes 440HD (here) or

newst48g500x500-11442194117  Yealink T48 (here)

 

Additional Resources:

  • What is Office 365 PSTN calling (here)
  • Locations where Office 365 PSTN calling is available (here)