[ad_1]
Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Business Voice as an add-on to its popular Microsoft Teams platform in early 2020. This Voice over IP (VoIP) add-on is available through Microsoft 365 or Microsoft 365 Business, formerly known as Office 365. Some might dismiss it as a simplified and lean VoIP solution for Teams, but we found both its features and Microsoft’s integration efforts to be excellent, especially with Teams, but also with the rest of Microsoft 365. Some unwieldy configuration options and a limit In both calling plans and users, the majority of what keeps this offering behind our Editors’ Choice winners in the VoIP category, including offers like RingCentral Office and Intermedia Unite.
This product offers all the features you would expect from a VoIP solution, including automated attendants, call queues, group calls, and the added benefit of deep integration into the Microsoft ecosystem. However, the gateway to that integration must start with Teams. Given that Microsoft Teams has slowly made its way into the category of critical productivity apps for many organizations, especially those facing large numbers of employees working from home during the pandemic, this isn’t too severe a prerequisite. However, both Teams and Microsoft 365 will be factors when you calculate the total cost of the solution for your organization.
Prices and plans
Still, we were pleasantly surprised by the breadth of Microsoft 365 Business Voice. As a complement to Teams, hopefully it will focus primarily on software with an emphasis on mobile devices, but Microsoft went to great lengths to ensure that this platform would work in a standard office environment as well. To prove it, the company provided us with a Yealink MP56, a fairly standard SIP desk phone (therefore compatible with VoIP). While SIP support was key for this desk phone, so was a Microsoft Teams certification. Microsoft has a list of Teams certified devices on its website, and the company emphasized that this certification was important to ensure the best experience with Microsoft 365 Business Voice.
True to his word, setup was quick and he connected to our test rig account with no problem. From the color panel of the phone, you can see your calls, a calendar with upcoming meetings, and voice messages. You can also enter events in your calendar directly from the phone. To connect to a meeting by voice, you only need a few taps on the phone’s LCD touch screen.
What this means for pricing is that, in typical Microsoft fashion, you may need to upgrade more than just your VoIP system to get the best of Microsoft 365 Business Voice. You will need to start with a subscription to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft offers a wide range of plan options for this cloud platform, starting at $ 5.00 per user per month. That’s for Microsoft 365 Business Basic, which includes web and mobile versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Pricing for Microsoft 365 Business Voice is currently a one-time fee of $ 20 in addition to any Microsoft 365 plan. The two limitations start with the number of minutes, which is set at 3,000 per month. That works out to 50 hours per month, which may seem like enough, but could easily be a factor for voiced roles like customer support or sales. Microsoft should look to expand this restriction. The other limitation is the number of licenses, which reaches a maximum of 300, making Microsoft 365 Business Voice a solution for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) only.
This means that you cannot compete with business-oriented offerings, such as Editors’ Choice winner, RingCentral, or Vonage Business Cloud, but instead seek to compete with SMB-oriented offerings, such as Intermedia Unite or 8×8 X Series. While Microsoft 365 Business Voice probably won’t compare as well to these SMB competitors on a purely price-oriented level, for businesses looking to use, or already using, Microsoft 365 Business, its integration and ease of deployment will likely make it a an attractive option.
User experience
One thing that gives Microsoft 365 Business Voice an edge is its partnership with Microsoft Teams. Unsurprisingly, Teams has received a great deal of interest recently due to the many companies supporting work-from-home scenarios during the pandemic. Similar teams and platforms like Slack have become the backbone of inter-office communications for many companies, so using that foundation for voice makes a lot more sense than when everyone was working in a centralized office space.
For existing users, adding the Microsoft 365 Business Voice option in Teams is a no-brainer. It just feels natural if you’ve used Teams for a period of time. Microsoft has a list of certified devices that work with the new calling feature. We tested it with the Yealink UH36 USB Wired Headphones and found it more than adequate. Calls made through Teams with this headset were clear and crisp even on a non-segmented network.
Having direct access to your contact list from Microsoft Outlook increases convenience and productivity when you need to connect with someone outside of your company. With just one click or push of a button on your desk phone, a Teams call or conference can be started. For contacts within your company, you now have a wide range of communication options. The presence indicator saves time if you just need to exchange a quick chat message with a coworker.
The Microsoft Teams mobile client handles everything the desktop client does from your phone or tablet. We tested devices on both an Android phone and an Apple iOS using an iPad Pro. Both experiences were well designed for these respective operating systems and, although they did not have all the features of the desktop client, they offered what you would expect from a mobile platform and what made consistently across all operating environments. The key here is making it possible to continue your work communications on a personally owned device, which is certainly doable with Microsoft 365 Business Voice.
System administration
All administrative functions occur from the admin.teams.microsoft.com website. With the administration page open, you have access to all the features you need to manage an instance of Microsoft 365 Business Voice for a midsize organization, including user management, role access control, and reporting. Microsoft adds its expertise with security and policy-based functionality to provide granular control over different features and which users get access. This same policy-based approach is used to grant control over things like meetings, live events, and conference bridges.
Creating a call wizard consists of answering a series of questions to configure the default actions for each role. This includes prescribing a call flow to determine how each call will be answered and handled. Options include playing an audio file or a specific message. Then comes the actual menu of options that callers can choose from. Unfortunately, we found that setting business hours is much more tedious than most other products we reviewed, particularly those that focus on ease of use, such as Freshcaller, as you have to set start and end times individually to each. weekday.
Reporting capabilities include standard call usage and the call quality reports you need to measure the performance of a VoIP system. The Call Quality Dashboard is a separate part of the Teams admin feature with default standard reports and the ability to create your own. Links to Microsoft’s Power BI platform using the Microsoft Call Quality Connector present an opportunity to drill down into your organization’s voice data metrics than most of the other products in this review.
Key features
Microsoft offers a wide spectrum of applications that integrate with Microsoft Teams. While most of these are not voice related, they demonstrate the flexibility of the platform to integrate with other applications. Microsoft has a long history of providing developers with the tools and APIs to add functionality to their platforms.
When you evaluate other vendors in the VoIP space, you will find that most provide some form of integration with Microsoft 365. That puts some pressure on Microsoft to ensure their own solution has the best integration with their own product, and it appears that the company I have worked hard to make it happen. Teams is fully compatible with other offerings like those from Atlassian and Salesforce. They also provide tools to assess the specific workload and provide recommendations for deployment and implementation.
Flexible but not for everyone
All that said, Microsoft 365 Business Voice is definitely not designed as a one-size-fits-all solution. This first version of the product is primarily aimed at general purpose VoIP for smaller organizations. Businesses looking for a sales- or support-oriented solution with features like call parking, management for a large number of carriers, or call center-like capabilities will end up looking for alternative solutions, as advanced versions of these features they are not yet part of the solution.
On the bright side, because you have such deep integration hooks not only in core Microsoft 365 applications, such as Outlook and Word, but also in the extended family of Microsoft productivity solutions, including Power BI and the various development environments of Microsoft. Microsoft, implementing its own Microsoft 365 Business Voice custom instance has many more options than you will find with most competitors. If you’re up for meaningful work, this platform presents significant customization possibilities as well as a fairly robust general-purpose VoIP offering that is easy to implement out of the box. Even if you’re not willing to put the effort, if your customizations aren’t too individual, there’s almost certainly a Microsoft partner willing to build them for you or already offering them as a value-added solution.
