How Reaseheath College have integrated Microsoft Teams into their Avaya Telephone system
With 258 million paid seats for Office 365, which includes access to Microsoft Teams and 75 million daily active users of Microsoft Teams during the Coronavirus pandemic, many businesses are now looking at their longer-term options to incorporate a more permanent voice, video and team collaboration strategy into their business, ideally using the technologies they have already invested in.
This is an area of many moving parts and no ‘one size fits all’ solution. There are also several factors to consider, to ensure your overall strategy ticks all the boxes across the wider business needs in terms of functionality, service delivery and compliance.
Reasehealth College were using two disparate technology platforms for managing voice, video and team collaboration.
The Avaya IP Office Server Edition system had been heavily invested in by the college to support all voice interactions. Reaseheath were using Microsoft Teams for collaboration and video meetings.
What were the key drivers for bringing these two disparate technologies together?
During a recent technology review meeting with Reaseheath, Reaseheath shared some key challenges around student/teacher communication and ensuring easy access to their ‘Wellbeing team’. Evoke discussed the potential option of integrating Reasehealth’s current Avaya IP Office system to their Microsoft Teams environment. There are tangible merits of this dual strategy which unifies the market leading voice capabilities of the current Avaya system with the flexible and widely deployed MS Teams technology, within the college.
The Avaya system was initially introduced to Reaseheath as a communication platform. The ability to integrate this into Microsoft Teams further extends that capability. It enables Teams users to be provided with voice and voice users with Teams, all as a single solution. Avaya on its own does not offer the same unified flexibilities that can be found in Teams. Teams on its own does not offer the unique school safety features offered by the Avaya system, it offers a diminished phone system, and eye watering call charges for out of bundle calls – e.g. mobile at 12.3 pence per minute. Therefore, a Teams integration into your Avaya Platform offers you the best of both worlds, further enhancing the overall end to end experience of voice, collaboration and video for staff, as they work from any location.
What Key Benefits can a dual Avaya and MS Teams strategy bring?
- Keep your existing phone services with all the features you rely on
- Only enable the solution for users and groups that need it
- Streamline the number of tools your users need to use, reducing cost, administration and training.
- A flexible SBC that supports both Teams integration and safe deployment of Avaya remote worker licences where needed.
- Voice calling capability for Teams users and Unified Communications for Avaya Users
- Easy and costs effective mobility and flexibility deployment to remote devices via the Teams app.
“A fantastic integration to Teams under normal circumstances, however with the current scenarios facing remote working for the majority, especially within the education space, this has transformed how we can deliver and support our students”
– Gareth Ferris, IT Systems & Infrastructure Manager
If you would like to learn more about how Evoke can work with you to integrate Microsoft Teams with your current voice platform, please do get in touch with your Account Manager or one of the friendly team on 0800 8403688 or hello@evoketelecom.com.
