Can customers video chat with us on their Facetime to us through Teams?

[PDXRobert]

Hello!

We just started using Teams at work.  We now have video cameras and speakers for a few of us.  We mostly use it to communicate with people working remote  in our organization.  Can customers call from Facetime to us through Teams?  We think this would be a new way for us to connect with customers.  Let me know what the options are.  Thanks!

Robert

[#2]

Hi @PDXRobert,

Unfortunately, not possible to use FaceTime and Teams together currently. I can’t say with absolute certainty, but I doubt if there are any plans to integrate this. There isn’t any even uservoices on the Teams Uservoice site for it.

You could look for the customers to maybe set up Teams Free if they haven’t already got Teams

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Differences-between-Microsoft-Teams-and-Microsoft-Teams-fre...

They you should then be able to communicate with one another

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Introducing-a-free-version-of-Microsoft-...

Would that be a possible option?

Best, Chris

[#3]

Don't do that, Teams free can't talk with Teams Enterprise :). I mean technically I guess you can invite people as guests, but it's ugly.

The easiest way is just have them download the Teams app which is free. They dont' have to even sign in. Then setup a Teams meeting via Meeting tab, or Outlook Teams Meeting. Send them an invite, then they just click the link, this will allow them to join that meeting as a guest and have full A/V and sharing capabilities as anonymous user.

[#4]

I was referring to the guest in that instance.

I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this because I know several organisations do this here in the UK and it’s worked fine for them. The other organisations then went on themselves to get Office 365 after.

If you are talking about B2C then yeah this probably involves less effort, but in a B2B sense for long running collaboration terms it’s way better to get them onto a free or paid version of Teams.

Best, Chris

[#5]

well if it's just for a few AV calls or something, the meeting method is the easiest by far and doesn't involve any account setups etc. If it's long term collaboration sure set something up more permanent, but having to switch accounts around, invite to certain teams and manage that permission just to have a video call with someone is kind of a bit :).

[#6]

These customers are probably still using on prem file servers, ICloud or NAS Drives. We’d all be doing them a favour getting them on Teams :face_with_tears_of_joy:

Best, Chris