With physical stores closing and many offices encouraging their staff to work remotely, it is crucial to guarantee your contact center stays up and running to handle your customers’ inquiries.

Microsoft Ignite is an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft. The conference normally lasts for five days and consists of presentations, white board sessions, and hands-on labs. Ignite offers great opportunities to meet Microsoft experts, MVPs, community members, and partners. Networking is enhanced through an exhibition area where vendors can show off technologies and products, ‘ask the experts’ sessions and after-hours parties. It has taken place in several locations around the world and we are excited to hear that 2020 will be in New Orleans, Louisiana!

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.

One of the strengths of ice Contact Center has always been the application integration possibilities we offer. In the 30 years we’ve been in the industry, we’ve integrated into both commercial and bespoke CRM systems, databases of various stripes, workforce management platforms, and countless other systems of record. While no two integrations are alike, there are some systems such as Dynamics 365, that are used far more often than others and certain integration points that are common and repeatable. This post highlights a few areas where you can use ice Contact Center to tie into the Microsoft 365 platform, including Graph, PowerApps, and Azure.

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.

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, member of TAP, and with three gold competencies and two silver competencies, there’s no doubt that ComputerTalk has strong ties with Microsoft. We are pleased to announce that you can now connect with us on Microsoft's destination for business apps.