More and more organisations are moving beyond basic, isolated usage of unified communications (UC) applications and starting to focus on how they can integrate UC with the other systems they utilise. Thanks to COVID-19 and increased remote working, Microsoft Teams integrations are a priority in order to enable home workers— but Teams should not be seen as the only important integration.
“UC integrations really are about more than just Teams. From our perspective the entire ecosystem is important,” confirmed Dean Holmes, the Director of Product Marketing at Fuze. “We think about interoperability across the board, whether that’s for click-to-call from your contacts, or if you see the contact details in an email. That’s just a couple of the integrations the ecosystem needs to address.”
Specifically, Fuze has recently improved its Microsoft Teams integration with the intention of replicating the experience of a user on Office 365 within Fuze. “If a user was wholly in Office 365, they could click-to-dial… so we want the experience to be the same regardless of the environment they’re in,” added Holmes. “That means Dynamics integration for call centres with functionality extending into pop-up windows to access contacts and other features.”
“In our platform, you can link to OneDrive documents in a chat and you can pull in documents to present through content sharing with Fuze,” he explained. “We’ll also pull your Office 365 contacts.”
For Fuze, it’s a case of allowing employees to use the systems they’re familiar with and that perform their business functions well, while also providing the best unified communications capabilities. For many office-related applications, Microsoft is the standard and Teams has therefore been an immediate solution to handling increased remote working. However, Teams doesn’t address the specific needs of many organisations once they need UC capabilities.
“We think we’re better at UC and international calling,” confirms Holmes.
“We’re in more than 100 countries with the network we’ve built, and that means we offer five-nines uptime and service level parameters to support that”
“When we think about integration, it’s about how we give users the best of both worlds. We don’t want to take away the functionality they need in order to provide our quality of service, we want to make it invisible.”
Holmes also points out that Fuze is constantly expanding the functionalities it can integrate, and has taken the approach of building integrations using Microsoft’s Partner Centre development program. This means that when products update, the integration also updates— so complexity is simplified and users remain able to access the systems they need. “The good news is that the Teams integration is all built on the Microsoft platform, so when changes are made in Teams it works across the whole platform,” he added.
Complex integrations will become a thing of the past as Fuze addresses multiple ways for organisations to integrate teams. “They might need our call routing as well as the countries we serve,” explains Holmes. “For enterprise organisations, we offer the flexibility to use us where you need us and have direct relationships where you want them. From our standpoint, we want people to use Fuze as a platform to access our UC capabilities and our robust global connectivity while still having all the benefits and user experience they would expect from Microsoft.”
To learn more about Fuze’s Teams integration, register for their webinar.
