Today, many businesses have standardized their internal and external workforce on Microsoft Teams for collaboration; when it comes to advanced communications, however, customers often need to seek out third-party solutions (which raises the complexity for workers and IT departments). In fact, the majority of Microsoft Teams customers have Microsoft 365 E1 or E3 licenses, which do not include telephony and require customers to purchase a calling plan or a Teams Phone license at additional cost.
That said, cloud communications company RingCentral, Inc. last week announced the next generation of RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0.
RingCentral was designed to provide flexibility with both direct routing and a next-gen embedded app for calling, SMS and fax. The solution brings RingCentral’s cloud PBX capabilities into Microsoft Teams with a fully native experience, and without requiring a second application. End customers can now take advantage of RingCentral’s 99.999% reliability, global availability, advanced features and third-party integration capabilities entirely within Teams’ single pane of glass.
With RingCentral, telephony is included with all licenses, and customers have a cost-effective and robust solution for an integrated, reliable, cloud-based phone service for Microsoft Teams that "offers advanced telephony features, such as call routing, custom call queues, automatic call recording, over 330 pre-built integrations and analytics," said RingCentral.
“Most Microsoft Teams users do not have access to integrated calling capabilities, which means they can't use Microsoft Teams to place calls outside the organization or to customers,” said Irwin Lazar, president and principal analyst at Metrigy. “As Teams users evaluate alternative telephony approaches, more than 47 percent are choosing to use a UCaaS provider, such as RingCentral, to enable calling capabilities for Microsoft Teams. RingCentral options for Microsoft Teams provide flexible, and highly reliable, deployment options and the ability to integrate enterprise-grade telephony and SMS, fax, analytics, CRM integrations, and other capabilities into a Microsoft Teams deployment.”
The new version of RingCentral for Microsoft Teams includes bi-directional presence sync between Microsoft Teams and RingCentral, new unified contact searching from RingCentral and Microsoft directories, in-depth analytics capabilities, an extensive set of telephony app integrations to connect CRMs and business apps, and deep integration with the Teams mobile app.
Edited by
Alex Passett
