Microsoft Teams Direct Routing Solutions
Enable external HD voice calling in Microsoft Teams and take your business communications to the next level.
Microsoft Teams Direct Routing – Empowering your business to work from anywhere.
Simplify the integration of Microsoft Teams with the PSTN using our Direct Routing Solutions to deliver collaboration, unified communications and enterprise telephony as a fully managed solution.
What is Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams?
Direct Routing is a way to provide a PSTN (Public switched telephone network) connection to Microsoft Teams users so that they can make and receive external phone calls on any device using Teams.
Traditionally, internal and external business telephone calls have been delivered using a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) phone system, usually located on the business premises.
Microsoft Teams can now be used as a business telephony solution, replacing an existing PBX phone system and its associated equipment and costs with a cloud-based system, to provide full PBX voice calling capabilities inside and outside your organisation.
- Make PTSN calls within Teams, with no extra hardware required.
- Simplify your communications channels – internal and external calling in one place.
- Simple setup process, can be deployed in minutes.
- Integrate your existing or legacy PBX quickly and efficiently.
- Choose your calling package from a vast selection of providers and contracts.
- Keep your existing numbers.
Partnering with a managed service provider for Direct Routing – what’s involved?
Service-provider managed Direct Routing as a Service (DRaaS) involves partnering with a managed service provider who’ll design, implement, and manage your solution, reducing the amount of resource needed internally. It’s important to note that not all outsourced providers offer an end-to-end managed service, so shop around to compare service levels.
‘Direct Routing as a Service’ refers to an end-to-end managed service provider solution, which is what we provide.
System design and configuration – We will work with you to design a bespoke solution, with tailored system design and configuration. We can oversee migration of users to Teams and take care of on-going management needs and quality control to ensure connectivity. We can also complete any required number porting, either all at once, or in a phased approach. Commstec IT can also support with associated issues such as general corporate network optimisation and network Quality of Service configuration.
Infrastructure maintenance and oversight – Commstec IT can assume full responsibility for end-to-end service, including updates, licenses, maintenance, and service availability. Additionally, we can provide tools to give vital intelligence into your Teams Calling service. For example, portals which deliver data analysis, with dashboards that display insight clearly, and enable adjustments (e.g. to user numbers) to be made easily.
Frequently Asked Questions
Direct Routing refers to the process of routing Microsoft Teams external calls to the PSTN (traditional phone network). Although Teams is mainly used as an internal communications tool, Microsoft has developed a way for the platform to be used as a fully-fledged business phone system (PBX)
The short answer is Yes! Should a customer moving to Direct Routing wish to retain their existing telephone numbers we will have to perform number porting. This is the process of transferring numbers between telephony providers. This process can take up to 30 days to complete. The impact of the transfer on the deployment timescale can be lessened by temporarily forwarding existing numbers to temporary Commstec IT numbers, however, this may incur a charge from the existing supplier.
These are connections between a business phone system, the internet and the traditional PSTN. SIP Trunks are an essential component for connecting any PBX to the PSTN and a genuine alternative to using legacy TDM based PSTN connectivity services such as ISDN.
With BT announcing the end of the PSTN as we have known it for over 150 years, now would also be a good time to start thinking about the migration to SIP for any other services you may have. Talk to us about migrating
Session Border Controllers (SBCs) are devices deployed at the border between private and public networks. An SBC can securely and efficiently transfer data from Microsoft Phone System — an on-premise or cloud hosted Private Branch Exchange (PBX) — to the PSTN network or aggregate of all global telephone networks. SBCs are often referred to as PSTN Gateways.
By partnering with Commstec IT, no additional hardware or software is required. We make Microsoft Teams Direct Routing super simple.
For Direct Routing you need a Phone System License for each user. If you are already using E5 licensing in M365, then you do not need anything further as Phone System is included.
To consume the service, customers must have:
• A Microsoft Teams license with Microsoft Phone System license.
• A valid DNS record for the customer domain will need to be created on the customers public domain name service which matches the domain name used for Microsoft 365.
• A valid SSL Certificate for each SBC gateway (e.g.sbc01.customer.com, sbc02.customer.com) will need to be provided. Wildcard Certificates are also allowed. We can help with setting this up if required.
That’s it!