Pbx Phone System

[Anush Faigley]

This article is for administrators and IT professionals who are evaluating Microsoft Teams Phone--Microsoft's technology for enabling call control and Private Branch Exchange (PBX) capabilities in the Microsoft 365 cloud.

Calls between users in your organization are handled internally within Teams Phone, and never go to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)--thereby removing long-distance costs on internal calls.

For making external calls, Teams Phone provides add-on options for connecting to the PSTN. For more information about voice solutions and PSTN connectivity options, see Plan your Teams voice solution and Connect to the PSTN.

Licenses and voice enablement - To use Teams Phone features, your organization must have a Teams Phone license. For more information about licensing, see Microsoft Teams add-on licensing.

Most features require you to assign the Teams Phone license and ensure that users are "voice enabled." To assign the license, use the Set-CsPhoneNumberAssignment cmdlet and set the EnterpriseVoiceEnabled parameter to $true. A few features, such as Auto attendant, do not require a user to be voice enabled (more about features in the next section).

With Teams Phone, users in your organization can use Teams to place and receive calls, transfer calls, and mute or unmute calls. Teams Phone users can click a name in their address book, and place Teams calls to that person. To place and receive calls, Teams Phone users can use their mobile devices, a headset with a laptop or PC, or one of many IP phones that work with Teams.

Purchase a Microsoft Calling Plan (domestic or domestic and international). Microsoft Calling Plan is an all-in-the-cloud solution with Microsoft as your PSTN carrier. For more information, see Teams Phone and Calling Plans.

Auto attendants - Auto attendants can be used to create a menu system for your organization that lets external and internal callers move through the system to locate and place or transfer calls to company users or departments in your organization. See What are Cloud auto attendants?.

Call queues - Call queue greetings can be used when someone calls in to a phone number for your organization. These greetings include the ability to automatically put the calls on hold and to search for the next available call agent to handle the call. The people on hold can also listen to music while on hold. You can create single or multiple call queues for your organization. See Create a Cloud call queue.

Turn prospects and visitors into customers and provide customer service on your website by engaging in real-time through live chat. Start with automated prompts to gather essential information, then seamlessly transition to a live-agent interaction.

Advanced IVR enables customer engagement inside your IVR to quickly and efficiently route customers to the right place, the first time. Enable CRM/CDP integrations to offer high-touch customer experiences.

Stop unwanted calls and voicemail messages by directing phone calls to another team member or voicemail. Your small business phone system can also forward calls based on local numbers, business hours, and holidays.

Connect a live call to another team member easily using your virtual phone system. Transfer calls via warm transfer (attended) or a blind transfer (unattended) using any desk phone, desktop app, or mobile app.

This is especially true for small businesses because many advanced features cost more than the local telephone company. A virtual phone system offers premium features like call queues, hold music, and voicemail transcription at a fraction of the cost.

It also works better than traditional phone lines. It connects through PSTN with its own cloud-based Private Branch Exchange (PBX). Calls are cheaper using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), saving small business owners hundreds of dollars using analog equipment.

Many business owners are familiar with traditional landline phone systems. Your phone company provides them and carries additional costs, including on-premises PBX equipment maintained by your IT team and copper wiring to connect your phones to the telephone service provider.

On-premises VoIP: Use your high-speed internet connection as the exclusive medium for calling and give you access and control over phone system features and settings. But, all the equipment and phone system maintenance is physically located in your office. You're responsible for updates, maintenance, and uninterrupted power and internet service. Depending on the size of your small business, this isn't the best phone solution for you.

Cloud-hosted VoIP: With a cloud phone system provider, you lean on their expertise and efficiency. You would only need a high-speed internet connection for business phone calls and team communication. In most cases, the VoIP phone provider will suggest affordable IP phones you need and free apps to receive calls from any desktop or mobile device.

Top VoIP providers can outfit your business with dedicated technology, including phones, headsets, mobile apps, and more. Top VoIP phone system providers will also give you the dashboards and technical tools to seamlessly view every customer conversation in a single place, regardless of whether it happens by phone, email, or text messaging (SMS).

Nextiva is the best choice for small businesses and enterprises. With its superior reliability, advanced functionality, system feature choices, ease of use, and customer service tools, no other VoIP provider comes close. Nextiva also includes live customer support 24/7. It might not seem like a big deal now, but getting real customer support from your phone service provider is priceless.

International calling is up to 90% cheaper with business VoIP. Its call management features let you restrict which users or ring groups can dial international phone numbers. Travel globally? You'll avoid costly toll charges for dialing the U.S.

Phone calls, instant messaging, and SMS/MMS messaging, all in one place. Dialpad has both a desktop app and mobile app (and works on browsers too). Whichever business communication channel you prefer, you can do it all right from Dialpad without having to switch between different tabs.

Dialpad is SOC2 Type II compliant and can help you meet your GDPR compliance requirements. From personally identifiable information to actual phone calls, Dialpad ensures that your data is encrypted and secure no matter where you are and what device you're using. There are also intuitive in-meeting security controls and APIs that allow for automatic pausing of call recordings for added security.

Sign up for a 14-day free trial to try Dialpad now! It takes just a few minutes (even faster if you sign up with your Google or Microsoft 365 account) and you'll be set up with a virtual business phone number too. Or, take a self-guided interactive tour of the app on your own!

As I further my evaluation of MS Teams use to augment or replace some or all of our PBX/Call Server functionality, I have questions about whether or not it is possible to limit those who administer it.

We currently have over 100 locations with stand-alone telephone systems that each provide service with over 300 telephones. That may or may not be large in your world, and certainly doesn't fully and accurately describe our enterprise, but I mention it to point out that we currently have hundreds of administrators caring for these systems all over the world. I'll give an example of what I'd like to be able to do, first by setting the scene.

We will likely use direct routing and will want users to dial 9+XXXXXXXXXX to dial off system. North American dialing will be easy to administer, but our overseas locations is where dialing restrictions or class of service will need to be managed closely. For example, I may want someone to have local dialing but not long-distance dialing, common in the PBX world and from what I can tell in MS Teams with the use of direct routing, easy enough to identify a digit string and point that to an SBC. I'm not looking for instructions on that, though if that is not possible please let me know.

1) Can I have a person with limited administrator privileges that only allow them to administer a group of users (the ability to make changes only for persons assigned to one overseas office)? For example, I would want someone to have the ability to change users' ability to call long-distance or local, but only for persons who work at a particular office that the administrator supports.

2) Can I limit the SBCs and administrator can configure calls to route to? For example, I may not want an administrator for users in London to be able to make changes that allow them to make calls off the Paris SBC. I will want those type of calls to be possible, but I may want to limit who can configure that type of routing.

Re #1 - Not really. There are RBAC roles which provide limited configuration capabilities based on role membership, but as far as I know, a single RBAC role does not support scoping of those permissions to a group of users (such as a remote office location). It's all or none.

Re #2 - Once SBCs are input into Direct Routing they become available to be used globally, but usage in Outbound Routing is not active until someone adds the SBC/Gateway into the proper routing configuration. From what I know, if you have a user that is able to manipulate the Voice Routing configuration via RBAC, that applies to all configuration in Direct Routing. Again, all or none.

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