INTERVIEW
Voice Enabling Teams
Comms Business Magazine talked at length with Lucy Green, Managing Director of Larato and Charles Rickett,
Managing Director of Swindon based CSP V12 Telecom, about the opportunities for resellers to develop VoIP sales
based upon the Microsoft Teams Platform
Microsoft has had
challenging journey
when it comes to voice
communications. For
the last, say twelve years, there
has been a section of the channel
that has been persistently telling
me that Microsoft is going to
dominate the voice market and
put most resellers that continue
with premises based PBX systems
out of business within the next
12-18 months.
e fact that CPE sales have
indeed fallen o a cli during
this period has, in my opinion,
less to do with Microsoft and
more to do with the 2008
global nancial crash together
with the fact that cloud/hosted
telephony just happened to be in
the right place, at the right level
of maturity at the right time
as enterprises shied away from
CAPEX because… well they had
no capital to expend.
During this period too,
Microsoft introduced an array
of voice based application
iterations – see below ‘Road to
Teams’, all of which had the
press competing to fawn in ever
greater degrees of sycophancy.
As for vendors of the time, well,
all I need to say is, “Product
Optimised for Microsoft Lync”.
But, could it be the fat lady
from Redmond is about to get
on her feet and air her voice to
the channel? It’s a question I
put to Lucy Green, Managing
Director of Buckinghamshire
based business development
rm, Larato, who pointed me
rstly in the direction of a recent
report from Spiceworks.
Sure enough, this report
shows that adoption of Microsoft
Teams is growing rapidly and
is set to become the secondbiggest
workplace chat app by
2020, surpassing both Slack and
Google Hangouts but behind
Skype for Business.
Spiceworks found that the
penetration of Microsoft Teams
grew from 3 percent in 2016 to
21 percent in 2018. is growth
can be attributed partially to
the fact that Microsoft made
Teams available globally in 2017.
Previously, it was only available
to business users of O ce 365.
e sudden rise of Microsoft
Teams is likely in uenced by
the fact that it’s available at no
additional cost to O ce 365
users.
Balancing this enthusiasm
to a degree is ‘Redmond’, the
independent website for the
Microsoft IT community, who
last month published an update
on the Skype for Business/
Teams ‘merger’ by stating that
feature parity between the two
collaboration solutions is still
an ongoing process. Moreover,
they said, ‘Microsoft ultimately
may not support adding some
of the less popular Skype for
Business features to Teams and
Lucy Green, Managing Director of Larato
that migrations to Teams is a
fairly complex consideration for
organisations’.
But enough of that, I’d
said to Lucy Green that what
I wanted to know was how the
voice side of Teams was shaping
up – you could say, I needed a
‘Team Talk’.
Lucy started with a quick
online demonstration with an
instance of Teams running
at one of her clients. at
worked well as far as showing
the bene ts of collaboratively
working but sadly, voice was ‘not
enabled’ on this installation.
So how do you enable voice
on Teams?
ere are two ways says Lucy
Green as she reminded me that
voice is not a standard feature
with Teams.
Firstly, you can elect to
deploy and use the Microsoft
Calling Plan. According to >
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