There are loads of Microsoft Teams integrations. There are quite a few Microsoft Teams calling integrations. There is not a great deal of differentiation.
That’s where we think our Callroute Teams calling integration slots in perfectly.
It’s not just a Direct Routing play. It’s not like we’re an Operator Connect partner.
And, no, we don’t just enable third-party calling from your Teams client.
Right, that’s the things our Teams calling integration isn’t. Onto what we can do for you.
Other Things We Don’t Do: Here’s Everything Callroute Can’t Do For You
What you can do with our Microsoft Teams calling integration
1. Connect any carrier to Teams
Whether you have a phone system, collaboration platform, or contact center, if you’re a Teams-first business, you want everything in place.
With 3.3 the average number of collaboration apps in use, the likelihood of a genuine Teams-only deployment is low.
With Callroute, you can take your Avaya PBX, Cisco Call Manager, or even a cloud-native UC solution like Webex and connect everything together while presenting Teams as the calling interface.
Behind-the-scenes, you’ve connected your PBX and can push and pull numbers any which way. If your New York office needs to use local numbers stored on your Avaya PBX for Teams calls, you can configure this in minutes.
2. Automate number management
One of our enterprise customers, with over 25,000 users, previously paid a hosting fee for phone numbers that they had no idea if they were in use. They had no idea because the Teams admin inherited a not-so-well-maintained spreadsheet that manage phone numbers.
If there are 1,000 of those numbers, retained at $0.50 per month, that’s $6,000 a year lost on hosting numbers that you haven’t use for years.
Rather than gambling on someone updating a spreadsheet each time you allocate, change, or unallocate a number, you can use of automated number management to do a number of things:
- Allocate numbers previously used in the same department
- Mark numbers as no longer in use
- Mark numbers are reserved for departments
- Tag numbers as reserved for special campaigns
Whether you use Calling Plan, Direct Routing, or Operator Connect, you can sync your numbers, categorize numbers by use and sort by location.
Without even thinking about PowerShell, you can assign voice policies and manage user personas using our single pane of glass for Teams management.
3. Enable per number routing
Once you’ve connected your carriers to Callroute, you can make a routing decision on a per number basis.
There are cases where some numbers within a range need to be routed to a specific destination. You can assign a number to any of your connected services. So, if you want to route 555–1212 to a specific to another one of your phone services, you can do so in a heartbeat.
When a number has been modified, this setting will override the default inbound route for that number.
For any number ranges that are BYOC or Callroute provided, you are able to set a primary and secondary inbound route for each number within a range.
The primary route is always used as the main route for call routing. The secondary route only operates when there is an error response from the primary route.
Error responses include: 404,503,500, and 488 SIP response codes
The secondary route can be another service connected to your Callroute tenant or an external phone number. If you’ve already set a secondary failover path, this will remain in place.
4. Turn on automatic failover
If Teams goes down, what do you do?
In the old days, everybody would pack up and go home.
Today, while some users won’t be happy about this, you can configure automatic failover for a seamless transition if the Microsoft service goes down.
If 99.99% isn’t enough, benefit from 100% availability and pre-plan diverts to any destination. So, if Teams goes down, you already have a configured failover plan for your most important numbers (or all numbers if you wish).
There’s no need for you to go in and panic divert each number, so the chance of error is dramatically decreased. Callroute picks up that there is a system error and that calls aren’t routing correctly, then automatically triggers the diverts.
How does it work? When we route a call to your phone system, we are looking for an acceptance message. If the acceptance message is not received or your phone system responds with a 4XX or 5XX SIP response error code, we treat this as a failure and will failover to your backup service automatically.
5. Get free Shared Calling
Heard of Shared Calling from Microsoft Teams?
Well, how about not paying for that service?
Shared Calling is the ability to enable outbound calling for multiple Teams users using a single phone number and calling plan. This is a game changer for Microsoft Calling Plan customers, who, until now, have been locked into a relatively expensive proposition versus what is available on the open market.
But, with Microsoft, you’ve got to pay to enjoy these benefits.
Instead, Callroute provides free Shared Calling. There’s no monthly subscription and there’s no minimum consumption commitment.
You just pay for the minutes you use.
Here’s how to get set up:
- Use our one-click Teams connect to configure Direct Routing to your Teams tenant.
- Create your auto attendant, shared calling policy, and emergency call back settings.
- Enable your users Teams Phone and apply the shared calling policy to their Teams account.
- Start using Shared Calling!
Yes, there is a little bit of setup. But there’s no professional services charge, either.
Honestly, we don’t understand why anyone would pay for Shared Calling when this is an option.
Oh! And there’s free admin training too.
How to get started with our Microsoft Teams calling integration
First of all, you need to integrate your existing PBX, VoIP system, or contact center with Callroute.
It’s a lot simpler than you’re thinking, trust us.
There’s no lengthy migration and there’s no prolonged periods of downtime.
Connecting your PBX gateway to Callroute is straightforward.
Your PBX gateway will need to support the SIP protocol and have a static public IP address assigned to it, either directly or via a NAT-based firewall (recommended).
Provided your system can support both these pre-requisites, initial setup should not take long.
Within Callroute, you’re going to be using the Bring Your Own SBC (BYOSBC) feature.
This allows you to connect Callroute downstream to your main telephone line service.
Head over to the Carriers section of our portal and click the “Connect an SBC” button.
You will need your PBX public connectivity information to hand to complete the settings in the modal popup.
- Label your PBX gateway connection as you see necessary.
- Choose your signaling protocol for your SIP traffic.
- We support both Secure SIP (TLS) and insecure SIP (UDP). If you want to use TLS, you will need to install a public SSL certificate on your PBX gateway. Self-signed is not supported.
- Then enter your PBX gateway’s public IP address. Or, if you’re using DNS, it’s fully qualified domain name that is resolvable public DNS along with its SIP signaling port (usually 5061 for TLS or 5060 for UDP).
- Choose whether your gateway will respond to SIP Options.
- Finally, enter the public IP address(es) of your media and SIP interfaces to open our firewall to receive traffic from your system.
- Press Save.
Your connection will then show under the “My SBCs” section on the Carriers page in Callroute.
Click the “Configure” button.
From the configure page, click “View Configuration” and this will show you the connection information you need to set up your PBX gateway.
Next, configure your PBX gateway to connect to Callroute using the information above. You will need to consult the administrator guide relating to your own equipment.
Next in Callroute, you will need to add the number range relating to your Teams users. You can do this by going to the Numbers section of the portal and clicking “Add a Range”.
Enter the first number in the range and how many numbers are contained in that range. Then select your PBX gateway from the list of carriers and press Next.
Now you need to set your default inbound route for calls received by Callroute. Select Microsoft Teams and press Save.
And that’s it from a basic setup perspective.
All that remains now is for you to use our portal to assign Teams users their phone numbers, then modify your PBX gateway routing table to route all calls to these Teams user numbers to the Callroute SIP trunk you created.
What will you use our Microsoft Teams calling integration for?
As they say, the possibilities are endless. But you probably have one pressing need.
Whether you have multiple disparate phone systems or suffer from admin overload, consolidating everything into a single platform often isn’t viable.
The pain of a full migration, the burden of a long-term contract, and simply finding the time to lift and shift your current setup is rather off-putting.
Instead, integrate your phone system with Microsoft Teams using our neat calling integration.
Next Steps?
