In the new world of hybrid work, online meetings are the delicate thread on which your entire team is balanced. Hybrid employees that have multiple bad meeting experiences in a day—due to connectivity issues, lack of correct tools, etc.—will experience a drop in productivity. During the pandemic, online meetings and calls steadily rose as a medium of work. According to Microsoft’s latest report, meeting numbers in Teams jumped to 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day in March 2020.1 And the total monthly Teams calls rose to 650 million in October 2020.2 For hybrid teams with office goers and remote workers, meeting and calling will continue to be the preferred medium through which people connect, collaborate, and get work done.
Why Is Microsoft Teams the Right Meeting and Calling Solution for You?
The demand for Teams will continue to increase because your hybrid workers want a dynamic meeting and calling experience. With features like meeting backgrounds, Together Mode, noise cancellation, meeting apps, and a webinar function. No other platform brings all these capabilities together in the calling or meeting space like Teams. Gartner recognizes Teams as a leader in meeting and calling. According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report, “Microsoft has advanced Teams’ meeting features and capabilities well past the previous iterations of its meeting solutions based on Skype for Business. This is expediting adoption of Teams not only from its Skype for Business customer base, but also across the broader market.”3
Additionally, Microsoft has made many of these updates accessible to a broader set of customers through promos and competitive pricing. From an organizational perspective, Teams consolidates the security, compliance, collaboration, and communication needs of a company under Microsoft 365. This could save you tens of thousands of dollars on communication and collaboration tools. As a result, more customers are now eager to choose Teams as their calling and meeting platform of choice, or they are bringing Teams to coexist with other meeting and calling platforms—such Webex or Zoom—so the employees can choose the meeting and calling experience they prefer.
IT Considerations for Adopting Teams Meeting and Calling
Before you adopt Teams meeting and calling for your tenant, you must be prepared to optimize for a diverse set of meeting and calling scenarios. Some of them are:
- The needs of your organization branch into meetings with chat options, contained meeting in Teams channels, meeting rooms, live events, and webinars. Setting up the right security, and privacy policies for each scenario is important.
- Audio conferencing (free through CSP) is becoming a crucial component of your Teams meeting strategy, especially after the shift to hybrid work. With audio conferencing, you could run all-inclusive meetings—regardless of employee location.
- The Teams calling options for your organization would be a combination phone system with calling plan, phone system with operator connect, and/or phone system with direct routing. Understanding the calling needs of your organization will help you choose the right combination of calling options in Teams.
When assessing your meeting and calling requirements, you will need to account for device demands as well. This means asking some of the following questions as you build a plan.
- What kind of headset, camera, or conference room equipment does each user need to be successful at each type of work scenario?
- Are your current meeting and calling devices Teams certified?
- How many of your old Skype for Business devices are still compatible with Teams?
- Do your Webex or Zoom devices provide interoperability with Teams?
Ensure success with Connection’s Teams Calling and Meeting Workshops + Poly Devices
To help you prepare for your Teams rollout, Connection now offers Teams calling and meeting workshops. They are free of cost for qualifying customers. Learn more about Teams calling and meeting workshops.
The Teams Meeting Workshop will use the “art of the possible” approach to get you up to speed with:
- Network readiness
- Adoption and change management
- Teams meetings and meetings rooms
- Rooms and device strategy
- Hosting virtual events with Teams
- Audio conferencing with Teams
The Teams Calling Workshop will use a proven framework to help you plan:
- Use case and scenario discovery
- Environmental and site analysis
- Management scenarios for calling
- Evolution of voice management scenarios
- PBX-to-Teams journey
- User, business, and administrator roles in Teams calling
IIn addition to workshops, Connection’s Microsoft and Poly teams can help you even more with your Teams-certified device planning. This will include assessing device scenarios and recommending the right equipment for the right use case.
More on Teams-certified Devices from Poly for Hybrid Work
Microsoft is constantly innovating in the Teams meeting and calling space. Poly has kept pace and now offers the most comprehensive portfolio of Teams-certified devices available. Ready to cover every meeting and calling scenario, Poly offers Teams-certified headsets, desk phones, speakers, cameras, room devices, and more.Device selection has become even more critical as we shift to a hybrid work world. You will have to support your employees with meeting and calling devices that work in various office and home scenarios. Here are few Teams-certified devices from Poly designed for various calling and meeting scenarios.
Voyager Focus UC
Poly Voyager Focus UC stereo Bluetooth headset helps you keep focus on the conversation, not the background noise. It features sophisticated noise canceling and immersive stereo sound.
Poly Studio P5
Made for hybrid work, Poly P5 comes optimized for videoconferencing with 1080p resolution and 4x digital zoom. It also offers a built-in privacy shutter, directional microphone, and integrated USB connectivity for easy plug-and-play connectivity.
Poly Studio P15 Personal Video Bar
Poly P15 comes with 4K clarity, automatic camera framing, and an integrated speaker and microphone array with advanced NoiseBlockAI technology.
Poly G40-T Small/Medium Room System for Microsoft Teams
Poly G40-T is a small and medium room solution. It delivers powerful Poly signature audio and video technologies for a superior Microsoft Teams experience.
Ready to learn more or to find the device for you? See the complete portfolio of Poly devices for Microsoft Teams today
1 Windows Central, 2020, 2.7 Billion Minutes of Calls were Made in Microsoft Teams in a Single Day
2 Microsoft, 2021, Introducing Operator Connect and More Teams Calling Updates
3 Gartner, Inc., 2020, Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions
Sreeraj Vasukuttan
Sreeraj Vasukuttan is a Technical Marketing Manager at Connection with a passion for technology and marketing. He enjoys writing about cloud, security, and end-user compute. In his free time, he loves watching films, cooking, and traveling with his family.
