Product Manager Bryan Morris from Cisco, recently published a blog about opportunities for companies to enhance their meetings with Cisco Enterprise calling. According to Morris, he frequently speaks to customers about their changing collaborative landscapes, and what they can do to make their tools more innovative.
The Webex unified app provides companies with a comprehensive meeting, calling, and messaging solution. The result, combined with video and IP devices, is consistent and seamless workflow. However, many customers have existing investments in place, or feel comfortable using tools from other vendors. That’s why Cisco wants to focus on allowing integrations.
Users can now use Slack and Microsoft Teams with Cisco enterprise-grade calling, for a more advanced calling strategy within their collaboration tools.
Integrating Slack and Teams with Cisco Calling
Often, finding the right strategy for calling alongside your collaboration tools can be difficult. Although tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack are excellent for messaging and file sharing, they can struggle with voice strategies.
However, calling integrations mean that you can bring Cisco calling buttons directly into your messaging apps. The calling integrations provide flexible new solutions for companies that are easier to deploy. All you need to do is select the Cisco client you want, and the calling platform you hope to use. When the Cisco calling integration is set up, you’ll be able to launch a Webex Teams call directly from your messaging app.
Whenever users click the call button, the integrations will identify who the user is chatting with, resolve the calling address, and pass the information to the installed Cisco client, which then initiates a voice or video call. The integrations support all platforms, including Cisco Unified Communications Manager, based on-premise and in hosted deployments.
There are no complex back-end updates that you need to make to begin, as these integrations are on a client level. There are also no routing policies or dial plan changes necessary. Companies don’t have to purchase additional licenses or hardware, and you can use your integrations with your desk phone controls too.
Cisco Calling from Teams and Slack
Cisco wants to make it as simple as possible for companies to enhance their conversations on Slack and Microsoft Teams. Since Slack makes it easy for calling providers like Cisco to integrate with the platform, adding the integration is a straightforward process.
You can use Webex Teams or Jabber as your softphone or access your deskphone. If your Cisco client controls your desk phone, then you can click the call button in Slack to cause your Cisco hardware to call your colleague. Cisco even offer slash commands like /Jabber and /Webex Teams to allow customers to make calls with ease.
The Cisco team is continuing to work closely with Slack to implement new controls and shortcuts going forward.
From a Microsoft Teams perspective, the Cisco calling integration has been available for more than a month from the Teams app store. This month, the company extended the functionality with new features. Aside from supporting Microsoft Teams web and desktop users, Cisco also added support for tablet and mobile devices. There’s also a new contact search solution.
Users can search through their Outlook contacts and call them with their Cisco calling platform using the existing integrations.
Looking Forward with Cisco
Cisco and the Webex team want to find new and improved ways of building bridges between collaboration apps and communication tools. The new integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams are an example of this new commitment to integration for the company. Webex supports many external integrations with other tools, too, through its add-on environment.
The Cisco Webex team is striving to help companies enhance their collaboration and communication strategies in everyday workflows. The company worked with Microsoft to integrate OneDrive and SharePoint enterprise control management solutions into the Webex messaging services recently. This helps companies to streamline the collaboration experiences that they have with crucial documents.
Going forward, the Cisco Webex team plans to continue building new integrations and tools to improve the collaboration and communication experiences for customers. You can contact your Cisco account team to learn more about adding your Cisco UC investments to your collaboration strategy. Or you can get in touch with Cisco to learn about more third-party collaboration integrations.
