What is direct routing and why do you need it for Microsoft TEAMS?

The COVID-19 constraint

The forced shift to working from home due to COVID-19 led to a massive increase in the use of Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Zoom and other Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC&C) tools. However, even these innovative tools can have their limitations if not implemented correctly, and many users are unsure when to use which tool and why often only a subset of features is available. Direct routing in Microsoft Teams turns your Teams into a powerful telephone system and central communication platform for your company. Teams offers you more call and communication options than you previously thought.

During the lockdown, the use of Microsoft Teams increased by 894 percent, and the use of Zoom by 677 percent. Employees increasingly used video calling, instant messaging and other UC&C solutions to stay productive and in touch with their colleagues. During that period, the use of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls as well as traditional voice calls also rose sharply. Many companies have since merged their old telephone systems into their collaboration solutions, such as Teams. The result is simpler communication and greater user-friendliness.

Why has there been such an increase in voice calls?

One of the main reasons is that while Microsoft Teams and other UC&C solutions are great tools to help employees stay productive and in touch with their colleagues, they were not originally intended for remote use. The solution is to connect Microsoft Teams to the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) so that employees can be just as productive from home as they are from the office.

What is direct routing?

You may never have heard of direct routing for Microsoft Teams, but if you are a Microsoft Teams user, you will certainly come across it. Direct routing connects your Microsoft Teams and Office 365 software to the public telephone network. It allows your employees to make and receive external calls, from any location, on any device running the Teams application: fixed or mobile, as a normal IP phone or softphone. Direct routing completes the user experience of your Microsoft Teams users and gives them access to all the features you would expect from a traditional telephone system. You get an integrated solution that helps you improve your remote working offering and gives employees a home working experience that is more similar to working in the office, delivered technically through a Session Border Controller (SBC).

What are the business benefits?

Direct routing improves your business communication. By integrating direct routing into your Microsoft Teams environment, home workers can work much more like they do in the office, and Teams becomes a true cloud phone system. By connecting Teams to the public telephone network, your customers, suppliers and partners can call you directly in Teams from their own landlines or cell phones. Likewise, you can call them directly from Teams on their landlines and cell phones.

Who is direct routing suitable for?

Every company, in any industry, public or private sector. Remote working is now common in almost every industry worldwide. By implementing direct routing in Microsoft Teams, you gain the freedom to communicate and collaborate as flexibly as possible. All your communication is mapped in Teams, whether collaboration, document sharing and video conferencing or classic telephony. All in one place, quite simply.

What comes next?

Hybrid working models have since become firmly established across most industries, so companies must continue to provide their employees with home office capabilities. According to a widely-cited Gartner survey from the COVID-19 era, 74 percent of organizations planned to make a permanent shift to more remote work, a trend that has since been confirmed. Direct routing is a valuable tool for equipping these home offices: by integrating direct routing with Microsoft Teams, you get a single, converged platform for voice and collaboration. You can extend your voice platform across your global wide area network (WAN) or the internet and have centralized control over it from your Microsoft 365 dashboard. And your employees don’t even need expensive desk phones on their desks.