As the developer of the Teams native ice Contact Center, ComputerTalk is currently one of the first companies to go through Microsoft’s Connected Contact Center for Microsoft Teams Certification Program. Among other benefits, this certification will mean that ice Contact Center for Microsoft Teams “has been tested and verified to provide the quality, compatibility and reliability [customers] expect from Microsoft solutions” (Microsoft, 2020).

During the first day of Ignite, Marissa Salazar, Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft Teams announced 7 exciting new Teams features. Most of these are top features requested in the past year by users.

One of the major improvements that Teams made over Skype for Business was the introduction of Direct Routing. In the SFB world, an onprem topology could be connected to the cloud for hybrid voice, but the architecture was complicated, and there were several restrictions.

The ice Contact Center already has full support for Microsoft Teams. Using the Teams client in conjunction with iceBar not only gives agents advanced call controls, but also screen pop and application integrations, visibility into the state of queues, and specialized and granular state controls that go beyond what Teams offers natively. This made for a great first step, but for organizations that are all in on Teams, we wanted to make the integration tighter and enhance the agent and supervisor experience.

If Microsoft Teams is your organization’s final destination, there are many paths to get there and several resources online that can help guide you through the process. There are factors to consider such as whether or not to use calling plans or direct routing, how and when to migrate Skype for Business users’ meetings, and how to stage upgrades so that users can still collaborate while in different upgrade modes.