Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

What’s the opportunity?

Launched last year, Teams has become one of Microsoft’s fastest selling products. An upgrade to the Office 365 Enterprise license, it offers collaboration, screen sharing, voice, video, IM and a whole bunch of other cool features. If you upgrade to E5 you also get Phone System, Advanced Security and Analytics, for £30.80 per user per month. If you have E1 or E3 and only want Phone System, you can just pay an additional £6 per month. Microsoft do not currently offer Phone System as an upgrade on their most popular Business Premium licence, but this is a logical next step.

What’s the issue?

If you want to connect Microsoft Phone System to the PSTN (you will, if Teams is to replace your PBX or hosted telephony system), the Microsoft Calling Plan product is a little clunky. It’s also quite expensive, compared to SIP bundles available in the market.

What’s the solution?

Instead of using their Calling Plan, Microsoft will allow customers to connect Teams Phone System to an alternative network provider using Direct Routing. However, setting this up is complicated and expensive and there are only a handful of companies in the UK offering Direct Routing as a service.