What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a central platform to allow your employees and external stakeholders to chat, make audio (hosted voice) and video calls and share files for collaboration.

Microsoft Teams fully integrates with Microsoft 365 products such as SharePoint, Office 365 Apps and Power Apps meaning employees can have fewer products open to get their work done more productively.

What is Hosted Voice?

Hosted voice is a phone system hosted in the cloud, accessible from almost anywhere. It is often referred to as terms such as:

Cloud Telephony
Hosted VoIP
VoIP
Cloud Phone System

Whith hosted voice, you no longer need physical telephony equipment in your office environment – a simple headset or reception console is all that’s required.

Moving your phone system to the cloud has a wide variety of benefits including:

Scalability: Upgrade your system without having to change your whole infrastructure.
Flexibility: Get access from anywhere instantly, including your home, office or even on the go.
Automation: Host an automated phone service to direct calls to specific branches of your business.
HD Voice: Phone calls dropping off or sounding awful are a thing of the past as the call is hosted on a fast secure cloud platform.
Always online: Never miss a call, as you can be reached through via the Microsoft Teams app installed on phone (iOS & Android).
Rapid deployment: You can quickly get the system installed and running and upgrade it if needed.

Connectivity / Leased Lines.

Having a hosted voice system comes with a lot of benefits but in order to avail to all of those you will need a resilient internet connection. Having a resilient business leased line is key.

Benefits include:

Dedicated uncontended service: It is all for you, no sharing with neighbouring businesses, in or next to your building. You get a resilient connection that has speeds and bandwidth you can rely on at all times of the day.
Huge Capacity, speeds and unlimited data: Unlike your home broadband service, dedicated leased lines have matching upload and download speeds up to 10Gbps. Essential for sending, uploading and downloading large files.
Robust SLA: Quicker fix times if you have any issues with your line.
Resiliency options: If there is a fault or a failure in your line there are resiliency options or backup options available:

1. Backup: If the main circuit connecting your office fails, a second one switches on. You keep connected. And can even continue to take call over your voice service.
2. Failover: A failover circuit has the same bandwidth as your main circuit and switches on if your main circuit fails. Your employees and customers will not notice any difference if your first circuit fails.
3. Load balancing: if you want both circuits switched on all the time, you can load balance traffic. This is when you configure your websites and internal systems to send different users along one circuit or the other. If one circuit breaks the other takes over.

How can Leaf help?

Leaf provide Hosted Teams voice solutions for all sizes of businesses. We work with you to understand your business requirements and any other telephony partners to make your transition a success. In order to ensure you’re getting the most out of your hosted voice solution, Leaf can also offer dedicated Microsoft Teams training, tailored to your business to help maximise return on investment and productivity – especially when file sharing is integrated.

If you would like to find out more about our Hosted Voice solution, please get in touch today.