Microsoft Teams is now a ubiquitous part of day-to-day office life but it hasn’t been introduced into a vacuum and different types of users have different expectations of the experience. This has led to some gaps in the Teams experience being identified, which were explored in the recent article ‘Resonate experts address complex Teams ‘gotcha’ scenarios’. That article focused on gotcha situations in which Teams doesn’t provide the simplest experience or is impossible to use and highlighted how most issues can be addressed with expert inputs.
Specific situations are not the only limitations that Teams users face, there is also the question of the endpoints they are using. Many organisations have a large deployed estate of devices that continue to be ideal for the communications tasks that workers need to carry out. For example, DECT phones are perfect for workers that move around an office, working from multiple locations, or who need to address queries by visiting colleagues or checking warehouse stock.
Certainly, mobile-first Teams solutions can address this requirement by replacing DECT with cellphones – subject to indoor signal strength – but not all workers are equipped with mobiles running the Teams app to allow them to do this. In addition, some categories of workers have specific devices that are tailored to their needs. Lone workers, for example, may have terminals that comply with regulatory directives to ensure they can be tracked or have an emergency button to press if necessary. Therefore, organisations need to consider the portion of their workforce that is not addressed by Teams because of the constraints of their endpoints.
Remove the Risks of Obsolete Endpoints
Creative solutions are emerging to address these situations. Teams Voice expert Resonate has developed real world use cases to help organisations remove or integrate more of their legacy systems to ensure workers continue to get the functionality they need from the enterprise communications system. Increasingly, as Teams has developed and matured, some of these solutions cross over into other areas beyond desk-based telephony. Teams offerings for mobility and field telecoms include just some of the examples of this richer capability.
There are now enterprise mobility solutions that are based on Teams such as Walkie Talkie options and Teams Phone Mobile. In addition, a growing number of devices that are designed for and based on Teams are entering the market as device fleets are upgraded. These devices, alongside Teams enterprise mobility solutions ensure that specific worker requirements can be accommodated within Teams and disparate systems and devices need not continue in operation.
Integrate or Replace
For example, functionality such as alarming, emergency alerting and man down or other lone worker options can be integrated into Teams using automated workflows. Use cases for local survivability and field telecoms can also be addressed, along with traditional functions such as paging. This means that enterprises don’t have to view Teams as only a knowledge worker application. Experts such as Resonate can ensure Teams can either replace task-specific endpoints by enabling functions using Teams certified devices or ensure the devices can integrate smoothly with Teams.
In either case, far more of the extreme voice needs of enterprises can now be accommodated within a Teams deployment if experts are used to optimise the deployment.
“For enterprises moving to Teams, the benefits are well understood for knowledge workers,” says Harkirat Degun, Product Director, Resonate.
“For workers with specialist requirements, though, Teams hasn’t always been able to offer a comparable or compliant experience. That is now changing as voice experts like us have found ways to address those requirements by extending the Teams platform. We’re proud to be helping workers and enterprises get more from Teams expanding uptake and further enhancing ROI.”
