Getting stuck on your Island of Interoperability! (Connecting Teams and other platforms)
Microsoft Teams is an island! Within this island, Teams desktop, Teams mobile users and natively registered Teams Room systems can call each other and be invited in advance by scheduling from a calendaring system such as MS Exchange.
But what about the rest of the world out there, those that are not on Teams? Can they simply dial in to your Teams conference? And on the other side of that, can a Teams user dial out from Teams to customers or suppliers using other platforms such as Zoom, Lifesize, BlueJeans, Pexip, Polycom, Tandberg or Cisco?
The answer is unfortunately no. Currently, it isn’t possible to just connect a Teams conference on one end to a different platform on the other end, not without using a pre-installed bot.
What can we do to make it work? A common work around is to apply a set of gateway licences (known as CVI licences) to your MS Teams account.
VideoCentric is certified to sell each one of the 3 official Microsoft CVI licences. Those licences are Poly RealConnect, BlueJeans Gateway for Teams or Pexip for Teams. Each of these is hosted by Microsoft on their Azure platform so that your Office 365 tenant account attaches to it.
Which CVI licences do I need for my Microsoft Teams Rooms?
- None if you’ll only ever make/receive Teams calls and never want external systems to join you
- One per named Teams user, if only a handful of such users will ever create invitations to non-Teams systems (Named User Model)
- One per concurrent line likely to be used (Ports Model)
- One for every employee in the organisation if regular external parties are likely to be invited company-wide (Enterprise Model)
How many licences will I need? The number of licences really depends on how many mixed platform calls you are likely to be running concurrently. The more licences you have, the more access incoming callers will have before they receive “all lines busy”.
Still confused? – We can walk you through the options in a live, remote demonstration. Just get in touch to book.
Phone: +44 (0)118 2142300
Email: sales@videocentric.co.uk
