Requirements and costs associated with Microsoft Teams

Support
2020-04-03 00:44

Hero's Teams Integration Pricing

Our Microsoft Teams pricing should be laid out in our Wholesale Pricing Spreadsheet we sent through.  Hero retail pricing for teams capable phone lines start at $10 for a single line with no bundled minutes.  We also have a range of call bundle options as well.  Please visit https://herotel.uk/teams.html for more details.  If you are a wholesale partner then please contact us for wholesale pricing which is offered on a tiered/volume basis depending on volumes.  This includes the phone number, channel into Microsoft Teams and includes SIP twinning capability and all Hero Cloud features which can be run in parallel with Teams (e.g. Auto Attendants, Call Recording etc.).

Microsoft License Fees for the Teams Phone System

 To enable Phone services for Microsoft Teams you need to have a 'phone system license' for each of your users that wish to have this functionality.  Here is a useful guide to licensing:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-add-on-licensing/microsoft-teams-add-on-licensing

You can add either an E1, E3 or E5 license for a user and this will give you the functionality you need to enable phone services for that user.  The E5 license comes with phone services included whilst the E1 and E3 licenses come with the ability to purchase a 'Phone System License' add-on.  If you are on a basic Office 365 license then it is likely that the Phone System Add-on is not available and you will need to upgrade to an E3 license for example first.

In terms of what Microsoft charge you for the phone system license this can depend on what pricing plan you are on with Microsoft.  The Phone System license add-on comes in at $12.10 per month per user (excluding Tax).  This is obviously in addition to whatever other licenses you are using from Microsoft.  The cheapest way you can deploy a Microsoft Teams phone service is under the E1 license which comes in at another $12.10 per month on top of the phone system license.  So $24.20 is about the minimum you can expect to pay on the Microsoft license side of things to get a user running with phone system services in Teams.  Obviously the pricing is higher if you add an E3 license or an E5 license as these come with many more applications such as the whole Office suite of products and Outlook/Email/DNS etc.

What do Hero Supply?

So, to come to what we supply - we are not a Microsoft Reseller - so we are not going to sell you Microsoft licenses or anything like that.  We are simply going to provide you phone numbers that automatically route to Teams and the capability to make phone calls out of Teams to the PSTN.  We obviously also provide any Hero Cloud features you might want to setup as well such as call recording, auto attendants, queues, fax to email and so on.  We are also able to supply you 'Teams Capable' handsets such as the Yealink T55A, 56A and 58A handsets and these can be auto-provisioned from our systems and portals (see https://herotel.uk/handsets.html)

As to the equipment you need to run Teams - this really depends on how you want to use Teams.  Most people just use the Free Teams clients which run on Windows, MacOS and also Android and iPhone Smartphones.  For example  you might have the Windows client installed and the Android client and when receiving an incoming call both of these clients start ringing and you can pick-up the call.  Likewise you can dial out through the Teams clients.  So the cost of equipment is basically zero if you are just using the software clients.  If you wanted physical handsets that are Teams capable to connect into Teams then the entry level Teams phone from Yealink costs $399+VAT.  However, with our unique 'twinning' feature you can actually run any SIP/VoIP phone alongside a Teams client if this was something you wanted to do.  There are many Teams compliant phones and devices out there you can source yourselves.  See the following link for details on these:

https://products.office.com/en-gb/microsoft-teams/across-devices/devices/category?devicetype=34

What are the key benefits to using Teams rather than a traiditional PBX?

The key benefit of moving your phone system to Teams is of course that your phone system would be fully integrated with Office 365 and the whole Microsoft ecosystem of products - so for example your clients would be able to access all of their contacts etc. when making and receiving calls.  Rather than having some internal comms happening in Office 365 and then a separate system for phone calls - the Teams integration product brings it all together so there is a single platform for all communications.  This greatly simplifies everything for a business I think.  Also, from my experience today a lot of customers are not using their fixed lines as much because they are not integrated well and they end up using their mobile phones instead for much of their calling.  By integrating their calling with Office 365 we think users are more likely to use their fixed lines for calling which drives up fixed calling revenues and with the Smartphone Apps they can do this on their mobile handset as well.

How long does installation take?

Installation takes a matter of minutes usually.   There are usually a few delays on Microsoft's side for domain verification etc. but typically you could have Teams integration setup and running the same day.  We have a detailed FAQ that will assist you through the setup and installation at the following link:

https://faq.herotel.uk/index.php?action=artikel&cat=20&id=108&artlang=en

There is a bit of a learning curve with the first couple of customers but once you get the hang of the process and your Powershell environment is setup and ready to run the commands it is mostly just a case of copy and paste from our web portals which give you all the commands you need to run to integrate the Hero voice lines with Microsoft's systems.

The best way to get a feeling for how long things will take is to get some test lines setup yourself under your own accounts and start to play with the product yourselves and then you can judge for yourselves how much time and effort is required to deliver the solution for clients.

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