Jay and Steve pretend to use the POTS

On the show this week Jason and I meet remotely again – though perhaps for the next show we’ll be able to meet in a park with an extra long set of cables to record in person – who knows?

But anyway – today we wanted to talk about a topic Jason has been getting into on a regular basis – especially over the last month with large organisations and smaller ones, including companies that have a lot of home workers – and those that have a lot of people in key worker roles or in jobs that can’t be done from home.

One of the key things we’re seeing is a greater up-take of companies moving across entirely to Microsoft Teams as their phone system and as many companies have rolled out Teams to enable working from home, or focused first on the collaboration benefits of the suite – like working with your team to get stuff done and co-author content together – and EW now moving on to use more functionality like the phone system.

However even now, with many people working from home Jason is also seeing companies adopting new Microsoft Teams Rooms installations and on the show today we discuss whether it’s likely to be something key to some companies over the next few months (and if so, why?) or if it’s something that we won’t see a real resurgence in until perhaps next year.

As always, our discussion topics on the show are below:

• You’ve implemented Teams – what’s the starting point that many organizations who have recently implemented it begin with
• So with Teams in place for collaboration and remote working – what are the next steps and options?
  • Voice migration?
  • Meeting rooms enablement?
• What are the options then for a smaller company moving to Teams voice?
  • Can you start easily or have a pilot?
  • Can small businesses add voice without moving to E5?
  • Remind us on the differences between calling plans and direct routing?
  • If you move across to voice across the company from your existing provider, what are the steps you usually take?
  • Do you replace phones with Teams enabled desk phones?
• For larger multi-national organizations, what’s the starting point? (Maybe keep this high level)
  • Moving from Cisco, Avaya or other solutions?
  • Moving from Skype for Business Server?
  • What types of users are most suitable for moving across to calling via Teams?
  • What types aren’t – how do you deal with contact centres and call recording? Are these APIs available and what solutions exist?
• People are moving slowly back into work over the next few months globally – depending on where you are on this, they’ll be a mix of people working from home?
  • What types of meeting room solutions are you seeing companies consider?
    • Huddle rooms?
    • Larger meeting room solutions?
  • What are the use cases people are thinking of?
    • Meetings with people in facilities where they aren’t going to have laptops, phones etc to hand?
    • Any other types of use cases – is the meeting rooms in the office going to persist through 2020 and beyond?

You’ll find Episode 45 above, and at our podcast site, on iTunes,Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, Google podcasts and you can subscribe with your favourite podcast app using the feed. If you’ve got any suggestions for what you’d like to hear on the next shows, let us know. You’ll find us on Twitter as @SteveGoodman and @jaywyn