So you've decided that you want to use Microsoft Teams to make and receive phone calls, and now you're faced with trying to decide HOW you achieve this goal. What are the options, which one is the best, and what do you need to make it all work?
Well, before we dive into the What and How, let's take a brief look at the evolution of calling in Microsoft Teams. Way back in 2017, Microsoft announced their plans to have Teams replace Skype for Business as their calling and communications client for Office 365 users.
At the time, it was envisaged that organisations would purchase a calling plan from Microsoft, and obtain a telephone number from Microsoft, which seems pretty seamless, right? And for most of the countries that Microsoft rolled out, it was seamless. Then there's Australia. Much like our lederhosen-wearing, beer stein drinking German friends, we have rules and regulations around who can operate as a "Telco" in Australia.
On the 20th of March 2018, Telstra and Microsoft announced a partnership launching "Telstra Calling for Office 365". Essentially this allowed Australian businesses to get phone numbers and calling in Teams without having to have their own infrastructure. This mimicked the Microsoft calling plan model but was offered by Telstra instead.
Over time, Microsoft rolled out more and more countries that they offered calling plans and numbers in, but as anyone who has ever dealt with a Telco will agree, this is a whole heap of work, red-tape and bureaucracy, and generally accounts for a good percentage of the hair pulled out of your IT staff's heads. So after Microsoft and Telstra's partnership model had been humming along for 3+ years, Operator Connect was announced in 2021.
Operator Connect was a standardised way for Telco partners around the world to inject calling capability and phone numbers into a customer's Teams environment, by accepting a "relationship" in the Teams Admin Centre, and then going to the Telco in question and signing up for services. From a technical perspective, this allowed for a standardised and easily implemented solution, and from a business perspective this allowed more customers to use Microsoft Teams for calling, leveraging the Telco of their choice, and in more countries than Microsoft could cater to directly.
Whilst a lot of customers are embracing a cloud-first strategy, and getting rid of all the infrastructure that they don't have to retain in order to free up their IT staff to work on other tasks and projects, the task of moving to Teams for an entire organisation is a much bigger one when you start looking at everything that makes or receives a call.
When looking at moving telephony to Teams, you quickly realise that it's not just a bunch of phones on desks. There's the fax machines, door intercoms, fire alarms, flooding alarms, elevator alarms and emergency phones to consider as well.
Luckily most of the emergency and alarm type applications and their vendors have now moved to using Mobile Services for their dialling needs, however there are still a lot of organisations that have either legacy PABXs that need to be supported during transition, or older analogue devices that they either can't get rid of just yet, or they wish to sweat the investment that they've made in legacy systems for a bit longer.
Enter Teams Direct Routing, or TDR as you'll sometimes hear it referred to. TDR is a way of establishing a connection from your on-premise environment into Microsoft Teams. This allows organisations to leverage the SBC (Session Border Controller, or voice router) that they already have, to route calls between their Telco, their own on-premise and legacy equipment, and Microsoft Teams.
The major benefit of TDR is that it allows for a staged migration across to Teams. You can move parts of your organisation at a time, thus reducing the risk involved in going for a "big-bang" approach. It also allows for the userbase to move across to Teams whilst planning a strategy for legacy connectivity.
For a lot of larger organisations, they have long-standing agreements with their Telco in order to get preferential pricing by combining voice, data and mobile services into one giant contract. This makes a lot of sense financially but potentially limits options when moving to Microsoft Teams.
Traditionally, TDR is seen as an older technology that's been superseded or overshadowed by Operator Connect, and this would be correct. However it does still have its place, either as a stepping-stone on the path to being completely cloud-native, or as a work-around for legacy contracts and legacy systems that need to be supported.
For most, it's a choice between the two that is usually based on the following:
However there's actually no reason you have to choose between one or the other. Both can co-exist quite nicely. This allows organisations to leverage the cost savings, reduced complexity and reduced risk in having the bulk of their users on Operator Connect, whilst also retaining connectivity with all the legacy equipment on premise.
Still confused? Hopefully not! But if you are, feel free to reach out for a confidential discussion about how we can assist with making this whole topic a lot less complicated than it might seem.