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Microsoft 365 Business Voice over SIP trunking: The best of both worlds

Help maximize remote collaboration while minimizing the costs and hassles associated with legacy voice and IT infrastructure.

Group video chat on laptop

Update: Rogers Business is now Canada’s largest operator partner of Microsoft Teams solutions and is the first provider in the world to offer Teams Phone Mobile and the first Canadian service provider of Operator Connect. Learn more here.

As the country gets back to work and the government eases pandemic-related restrictions, businesses have had a lot of time to reflect on how their employees communicate and collaborate.    

As a result, many businesses have discovered—or even rediscovered—the value of cloud-hosted collaboration solutions. This includes Microsoft 365 and, in particular, Microsoft Teams, which is a hub within Microsoft 365 that unifies email, scheduling, chats and meetings in one place. Furthermore, many businesses already using Microsoft 365 with Teams have discovered Microsoft 365 Business Voice: an app that adds calling to the list of communications options already found in Teams, along with all the calling features you’d expect, such as call forwarding, parking, blocking and holding, and AI-enabled features, such as multi-level auto attendants and call queues.

Microsoft 365 Business Voice is available in two ways

Business Voice is available via a calling plan, through which a customer can get new phone numbers, migrate existing ones and connect to the PSTN. But there’s another way organizations can deploy Business Voice, which yields greater ROI and quality of service because it allows them to modernize their entire voice infrastructure for a comprehensive, fully managed and scalable voice solution—and that way is to deliver Business Voice over SIP trunking.

What’s SIP trunking? It’s a technology that sends voice communications over the internet to the PSTN, acting as a more flexible and cost-effective voice infrastructure option than the long-established PRI standard. Since SIP trunking securely sends voice traffic over the internet, it eliminates the need to invest capital in the deployment and maintenance of physical infrastructure. It also allows video and instant-messaging traffic to be sent on the same network as voice traffic, simplifying a business’s overall IT needs.

Voice connections, because they’re virtual, can be scaled up or down as needed without a technician, and there’s no need for a business with multiple locations, be it across the country or the globe, to set up multiple phone systems; instead, there’s just one system centralized in one place—something that also comes in handy if most or all of your employees suddenly have to do their jobs from home.

Benefits of Business Voice over SIP trunking

Having Microsoft 365 Business Voice over SIP trunking offers the best of both worlds. With Business Voice in Teams, an organization’s employees can easily call, chat and meet with each other from almost anywhere on almost any device (with one phone number across the employee’s devices) for a regular monthly fee. The experience is seamless, doing away with the dissonant communications tools many businesses accumulate over the years.

With SIP trunking as the delivery method, that same organization no longer has to devote resources to operating a phone system. Legacy phone systems are comparatively costly, inefficient to manage and require expertise to maintain. And because of the pandemic, supply chains are interrupted, making it more difficult to procure crucial components for repairs and upgrades.

Delivering Business Voice over SIP trunking effectively creates an integrated, fully managed voice solution with a suite of other communications tools, helping to maximize remote collaboration while minimizing the costs and hassles associated with legacy voice and IT infrastructure.

You can learn more about Microsoft 365 Business Voice over Rogers SIP Trunking here.