Simplify Microsoft Teams calling with Telviva - Rob Lith — The author, Telviva’s Rob Lith

Even as South African organisations embrace online and collaborative working, along with remote and hybrid working environments enabled through tools such as Microsoft’s productivity suite, voice calling has remained a separate system, often because of the technical challenges and high costs associated with integration.

It is not ideal for an organisation to remain stuck in the status quo. Running multiple communication systems creates an administrative burden, requires paying for duplicate services and prevents a single view of the customer experience. To simplify operations, it is vital to move into one unified ecosystem, placing your telephone system in the same environment as the collaboration tools your business already uses.

Adding further complexity, organisations are dealing with highly uneven last-mile connectivity when it comes to remote and hybrid working. IT teams must now manage office users on stable, managed infrastructure alongside home workers who are entirely reliant on consumer broadband. Access to connectivity varies significantly depending on location: urban offices might use robust fibre to the business, remote branches may rely on LTE, and home users often use fibre-to-the-home connections that can be less reliable.

Hybrid work also increases the variety of endpoints that businesses must consistently support. These include:

Desk phones and softphones;
Mobile apps;
Browser-based clients that undergo continuous, disruptive updates; and
Varying user profiles, from knowledge workers needing full UC&C integration to transactional workers who only require basic voice calling.

By integrating Microsoft Teams with Telviva’s Call2Teams, you can seamlessly manage voice calls, video meetings and team chats from a single, unified platform. Move from fragmentation to flow in minutes. We’ll waive your setup fee to get you started.

Gain visibility and deep productivity insights

Moving to a single communication ecosystem provides significant business benefits. When all users operate within the same environment, the business gains visibility into everyone’s presence, making it easy to know the appropriate time to call, message or invite someone to a meeting. The integration also provides deep productivity insights into team interactions, allowing businesses to optimise workflows and break down the frustrating walls between the “front office” and the “back office”.

With Microsoft 365 being so pervasive, many local organisations have turned to Microsoft Teams for workplace chat and video meetings. However, research from BMI-TechKnowledge indicates that fewer than 5% of local Microsoft Teams users have voice natively enabled. As a result, most companies end up running disconnected systems indefinitely, maintaining a completely separate PBX just to handle traditional voice calls.

Organisations have historically resisted adoption because adding voice natively to Microsoft Teams was complicated and expensive. It required purchasing a specific Phone System licence and working with a provider offering Direct Routing to connect to the public switched telephone network — a lengthy process that came with prohibitive setup costs.

Telviva’s Call2Teams is a cloud-based software-as-a-service solution that sits between any Teams Phone, PBX or SIP trunk and Microsoft Teams, and does not require any additional hardware or software. It is a true multi-tenant cloud service, consumed on a per-user subscription. Because it is a native solution that lives directly inside the Microsoft ecosystem — rather than being clumsily bolted on at the edges — it offers businesses a number of advantages:

Speed and cost: Setup costs are significantly reduced and deployment time is slashed from weeks to days, while costs are up to 25% lower than Direct Routing. Users also benefit from being part of a cloud free-call community of more than 90 000 users, including Teams users connected to Telviva’s network.
Easy migration: The simple setup process allows businesses to seamlessly port and keep all their existing numbers, including DDIs.
Zero complexity: The provider absorbs all the technical complexity, meaning the business does not have to become an IT expert or manage session border controllers (SBCs) itself.
Single point of accountability: There is one point of contact when things go wrong, eliminating the blame game between Microsoft, the cloud telephony provider and the SBC vendor.
Advanced features: Unlock Class 5 PBX features within Teams, including call transfers, call conferencing and advanced call handling.
Governance: Use Microsoft Teams to manage users and policies, while Call2Teams gives you access to features such as regulatory-compliant, auditable and retrievable call recording.
Seamless experience: Users stay in the familiar Teams environment with no need for separate hardware, desktop phones, software or apps to make native voice calls.
Unified workforce: Teams users with natively enabled voice and voice-only users can communicate effortlessly as though they are on the same system.

When adopting cloud voice solutions, organisations must work with a provider that offers genuine local support and deeply understands the South African network environment — which is exactly what Telviva provides. Telviva has already done the heavy lifting of mapping its platform to Icasa, Popia and number portability obligations, ensuring that critical local regulatory requirements do not disappear once you move to the cloud.

Read: The voice gap holding back South Africa’s Microsoft Teams users

Seamlessly integrate Microsoft Teams with Telviva, giving your organisation native voice capability within your Teams environment and extended PBX functionality. We’ll waive your setup fee to get you started.