Forum Discussion
BToE actually works with Teams, but for how long?
The current state of Teams for any business that needs to use voice communication is sad. MS claims feature parity but it is far away. Little to no integration with physical phones is a joke. MS needs to puu their collective heads out of the cloud and realize that businesses need to interact with customers and customers don't want to put up with background noise or inability to talk because I am having a PC issue. We need the ability to use desk phones and it has to be reliable.
The old "unsupported" VVX phones work better with teams than the new CCX phones do. Not being able to use the app to start a call with the phone is a joke.
The other issue issue is the pain involved in trying to do a staged migration. Meetings don't work between S4B and Teams. Why?
We don't want to be beta testers, but we are being forced to.
- Have either of you progressed with your move to Teams? Looking to reference some real world usage for Teams voice in the SMB space. We are a small shop with 31 humans and not in need of a huge feature set of phone features. Would like to get some Teams voice feedback.
Team_FMI I agree with TJ Cornish For the most part Teams now works as long as you use the vanilla voice features. Having everyone remote without hardware phones has made it work. If we would go back to everyone in the office using vvx phones I think the level of frustration would remain low as it is mostly working for answering calls. The lack of integration with the app does cause some lack of productivity since the app has no way of knowing you are in a call. Other Teams functions like sharing can't be used unless the call is restarted with all users on the app.
I have two ccx phones that I acquired for testing. the last software update makes them a little more user friendly but without the bluetooth connection to the app being available they are nothing more than expensive dumb phones. I am looking forward to the next release and hope they might become usable for our executives. At this point I don't see us purchasing hardware phones for lower level employees but just headsets.
We have been full Teams since last fall. PM me if you want to have a phone conversation about what life has been like in more detail, but here are the highlights:
- We pulled BToE and just used our Polycom VVX phones standalone via web sign-in. BToE just wasn't worth the hassle.
- Teams is still not at feature parity with SfB for call flows - one of the major issues we had to deal with was the lack of a second forwarding hop. In SfB, you can have a user's phone ring immediately, have delegates ring after a delay, and then still forward somewhere. In Teams you can't - all delegates ring at the same time as the original phone.
- We have been working from home since about 3/15 due to COVID, so only a few people are using a Polycom phone daily. Those that are are actually harder to deal with from a support standpoint, as invariably they need something, but I have to ask them to hang up the call we are on and call me back from their Teams client so we can screen share.
- If COVID ever ends and we are back in some semblance of an office, we will have to figure out how to handle things. Some people will gratefully go back to their box with a handle on it; others have become accustomed to the headset workflow, but since our office world is desktop computers, that means three pieces of extra hardware - webcam/microphone, speakers, and the headset, and swapping devices around in software is clunkier than a box with buttons.
- I have not checked in lately to see if the replacement for BToE has been released for Teams-native devices like the Polycom CCX, but I can't see us buying them since it's very clear that MS doesn't care and wants to force everyone to using the software client. It remains to be seen if that decision is an Apple-esque "trust me, I know best" thing that actually works out or not. Microsoft doesn't have a great track record here.
- Teams reliability was unusably bad for various periods in the last 9 months - we had lots of calls where they didn't connect, audio was one-way, or other issues. It was especially bad in late March/April as MS apparently wasn't prepared for the sudden usage increase due to COVID. It has been quite a bit better for the last 2-3 months, but I just got a report yesterday from a user saying a large percentage of his calls don't compete on the first try lately.
- Until about March, the Teams phone app was unusable. There was so much ring latency that about 75% of the time the call was already headed to voicemail before the app rang. They did something and it's much better now.
- The one place we aren't full Teams is our "front desk" phone. It's a Polycom VVX with sidecar. That configuration works better as a SfB only client, but it's a pain in the butt to change call forwarding settings if you don't have access to the Polycom (all employees are at home). The solution is to log into the SfB client as the front desk phone user, but MS makes it hard to get the SfB app (SfB Basic is what you probably have, but that can't do call forwarding even if the user is licensed), you need to get the SfB 2015 version which is a separate download. You are then stuck in a bunch of misery related to activation and licensing garbage trying to use a second user login on a PC with standard E5 licensing.
The short version - Teams has gone from an unfinished bucket of junk 6 months ago requiring constant apologizing for to my users (e.g. huge number of incomplete/failed calls) to something reasonably useful, but only if you stay in the center lane. Any complicated call coverage situations, device requirements, etc. are perilous. The good news for me personally is COVID has hidden a lot of the limitations as people are forced to work more in the style of what MS envisioned Teams to be - remote knowledge workers.
