In our last two posts, we discussed the telephony limitations of Microsoft Teams and how to resolve them through integration with the RingCentral telephony platform. In this post, we’ll take a look at your deployment options — and a new update that makes the process faster and easier than ever.
There are two ways to access RingCentral’s advanced telephony capabilities from within Teams. You can either embed a softphone dialer app directly into the Teams platform or use a direct routing solution that connects Teams to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The May 8 launch of RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0 eliminates some previous licensing complexities while also providing deeper integration, an enhanced mobile experience and more robust administrative tools.
Deployment Options
The embedded dialer option is the easiest option. The dialer syncs with your RingCentral contacts for easy access so that users can quickly place and receive calls, access voicemails, and send or receive a text message or fax. With the recent update, there’s nothing to install — the dialer is embedded natively into Teams. Users just have to click on a RingCentral icon in the navigation bar.
Direct routing creates a more robust telephony environment by allowing you to connect the RingCentral infrastructure to Teams using a Microsoft-certified session border controller (SBC). This approach gives users access to advanced telephony features, such as call routing, custom call queues, automatic call recording and analytics. With the recent update, all of those features are now available on both desktop and mobile devices.
The update also simplifies some of the licensing issues involved with direct routing. Most Microsoft Teams customers have Microsoft 365 E1 or E3 licenses, which do not include telephony and previously required customers to purchase a Microsoft calling plan or upgrade to an E5 license at additional cost. With RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0, however, telephony is included with all licenses.
Service Levels
Direct routing also offers flexible deployment options with three levels of service:
Basic access is the simplest and most cost-effective level. It allows users to make and receive calls through Teams but doesn’t provide calling features such as call transfer, hold and park. It also requires organizations to purchase, deploy and maintain their own SBC — a complex task for most IT teams.
Direct routing as a service enables businesses to connect through a third-party provider, removing the need for in-house technical expertise and on-premises infrastructure. This option also offers more advanced calling features such as voicemail, call recording and call center integration.
Enhanced Teams telephony service is the most comprehensive service level, providing advanced PBX functionality, improved integrations, more detailed analytics and reporting, and next-level support. Advanced calling features include call routing, interactive voice response, auto-attendant and call queuing.
Additional Features
Other key capabilities enabled with RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0 include:
- Bidirectional presence sync automatically detects and syncs presence status between Teams and RingCentral users.
- Industry-leading analytics allow users across all departments to create customizable dashboards for real-time insights, without the need for a Power BI license or any specialized services.
- Deep mobile integration ensures users can place and receive calls through the Teams mobile app.
- Contact center integration consolidates all digital communication solutions under a single pane of glass.
- A smart sidecar panel provides users with quick access to key contacts and advanced call features such as monitor, whisper, barge-in and queue management.
RingCentral’s flexible deployment options make it simple to integrate enterprise-grade telephony, text, fax, analytics and other communication capabilities into a Microsoft Teams environment. Contact us to learn more about using RingCentral for Teams to enhance your organization’s communications, collaboration, productivity and efficiency.
