Blog

Team Collaboration is Growing

Unified Communications (UC) has been on the rise to keep business collaboration alive in the time of COVID-19. Among the UC platforms, Microsoft Teams has shown to be one of the most popular. It has the advantage as a free addon with some of the Microsoft Office 365 licenses, making it accessible for anyone with these subscriptions. The use of Microsoft Teams has increased immensely in wake of stay-at-home orders and the change to remote work. The daily active users on the application has jumped from 32 million in March 12^th, 2020 to 75 million on April 30^th, 2020. These users gain access to quality features that include secure collaboration spaces that are accessible from all devices, such as Android, Windows, and iOS. Despite its growing userbase and recognition of its strength as a platform, MS Teams still could increase its capabilities further. The key lies in premise-based phone systems and hosted cloud “PBX” systems.

Dwarfing MS Teams’ impressive numbers, premise-based phone systems and hosted cloud PBX systems have a much larger user base with about 350 million users available. Because of the strong base of existing PBX infrastructure, businesses looking to use MS Teams would benefit greatly if they were able to integrate MS Teams’ features into their existing PBX systems. PBX (private branch exchange) systems create a private telephone network for a company to communicate internally and externally, with features like transferring calls, voicemail, call recording, interactive voice menus (IVRs) and call queues. FirstComm’s Cloud IP PBX takes these features a step further by allowing users to have access to web portals, so they can manager their accounts anywhere Internet access is available.

FirstComm UC Teams Integration Removes Current Limitations

Currently, when MS Teams is integrated, the company’s existing PBX system is replaced with Microsoft’s PBX feature sets. Although Microsoft’s imbedded PBX features are adequate, they often lack the robustness of FirstComm’s UCaaS systems.  Here at FirstComm, we are ecstatic to announce it is now possible to fully integrate our UCaaS offering with MS Teams.  We are excited to soon share with you our MS Teams integration capabilities.

Under FirstComm’s UC Teams offering, you are able to utilize our vast UCaaS feature offering while using MS Teams as your native phone through their Web, Desktop, and Mobile applications which connect with non-Teams users or those devices that do not need a MS Teams License. By doing this, we are aiming to enhance the MS Teams experience to expand its capabilities to you, our customers.

The Future is Online Collaboration, Let’s Embrace It

With the continued climbing numbers of users across all popular collaboration platforms, the trend assures us that this is the way forward for how businesses are operating. MS Teams has amazing tools that mesh well with FirstComm’s offerings and enhance the communication experience. By equipping your company with FirstComm’s UC Teams Integration, you are set up to succeed in the growing sphere of online communication.

For more information or to learn more about this service, feel free to contact our sales department at: fcsales@firstcomm.com