Cloud calling
Teams Phone, carried by Telstra
Microsoft Teams Phone on Telstra Operator Connect. Your numbers move to the Microsoft tenancy you already own, calls route over Telstra, and the phone system is administered from the Teams admin centre instead of a box in a comms room. Ericom raises the Telstra paperwork, ports the numbers, designs the call flows and stays on the end of the line afterwards.
Nobody wants to touch it
The phone system is the one piece of infrastructure that everybody notices and nobody owns. It works, so it is never this year's project. The person who configured it has left. The maintenance contract renews on its own, and the quote to change anything arrives with a site visit attached.
Meanwhile the organisation moved. Half the staff work somewhere else at least some of the week, and they are already in Teams all day. The desk phone rings in an empty room and the call goes to a voicemail box nobody checks.
The reason it does not get replaced is rarely the calling. It is everything attached to the old system that nobody has a list of.
Two ways to buy the calling itself, and the choice is usually worth more than any other decision on the project.
-
Shared lines, paid by concurrency
You buy the number of calls that can happen at once, not the number of people. Four staff sharing two lines can hold two conversations at a time, and everybody keeps their own number.
- The ratio improves with size. A twenty person office has run on six concurrent lines, a little over three to one. A twelve hundred user organisation has run on a hundred and twenty, ten to one. The bigger the organisation, the less likely everyone is on the phone at once, and the bigger the gap between this and per user pricing.
-
Individual lines, one per person
A dedicated calling plan for each number. Simpler to reason about, and the right answer where most of the organisation is on the phone most of the day, or where a team cannot tolerate a busy signal at peak.
- Contact centres, service desks, reception teams and anywhere the phone is the job. Most organisations end up with a mix.
-
Operator Connect, or the fallback
Operator Connect is a cloud service built jointly by Telstra and Microsoft. Numbers and call flows are managed from inside your own Microsoft 365 tenancy with no gateway on site. Where Operator Connect cannot be used, Telstra Calling for Office 365 does the same job by a different route.
- Some numbers and number ranges cannot be moved to Operator Connect. We check yours before the project starts, not during it.
-
Failover you can prove
Telstra Business Continuity for Teams diverts inbound calls to another destination when Teams or the interconnect is unavailable. Call forward not reachable handles the outage, call forward always handles the planned diversion.
- Optional, and worth having anywhere a missed call is a lost order or an unanswered emergency.
The calling is the easy part
On a large multi-site migration, configuring people with Teams accounted for about a quarter of the professional services hours. The rest went on everything in the building that is not a person with a laptop, and that is where these projects run late when nobody has counted it up front.
-
Two-way radios and analogue adapters
Radio systems, paging and anything else expecting an analogue line needs an adapter configured and tested against the new platform. This was the single largest line of work on the project, larger than configuring the users.
-
Handsets and shared devices
Desk phones, common area phones and shared devices are provisioned remotely. Somebody on your side plugs the phone into a network port and enters a code on screen, and we do the rest. It is straightforward and there is a lot of it.
-
Lift phones, gate phones, emergency phones
The handsets nobody thinks about until the day the old system is switched off. Every one has to be found, tested and cut over, and none of them can be left until afterwards.
-
Fax machines and intercoms
Still present in more organisations than admit it, usually attached to a process somebody depends on. They are found during discovery and dealt with deliberately.
-
Number ranges and porting
Numbers move from the existing carrier to Operator Connect. The paperwork happens in business hours and the cutover happens after them, in planned change windows, with somebody of yours on site to confirm it worked.
-
Auto attendants and call queues
The menu a caller hears and the group that picks up. You supply the options, the scripts and the after-hours announcements, and we build and test the flows.
How a migration runs
Four phases, with the deliverables named in each. A small office is a few weeks. A large multi-site organisation with radios, lifts and thousands of numbers has run to fifty.
-
Manage
Project controls, a named contact, change control and status reporting. The kick-off hands over the data collection sheets, which is where the list of users, numbers, sites and devices comes from.
-
Design
Discovery against what you actually have, then a design document, a migration runsheet and a test plan. A remote workshop walks the design and the deployment plan and you sign it off before anything moves.
-
Deliver
Telstra paperwork and service provisioning, Teams Cloud PBX configured to the design, a pilot, then production in planned change windows with cutover after hours. User acceptance testing runs against a supplied test sheet so acceptance is a document rather than an opinion.
-
Handover
As-built documentation of every setting, train the trainer for your champions and admin centre training for the people who will run it, then technical handover to whoever supports it. That can be your team, Ericom, or somebody else.
What every project includes
The base package, before anything is added to it. Everything below is done remotely.
Leads with
The Telstra paperwork
Raising it, provisioning the service and provisioning the numbers. This is the part customers most often assume they will have to chase themselves, and the reason a lot of them call us.
-
Design, signed off before anything moves
Data collection, a discovery meeting and a remote workshop that ends in a signature.
-
One auto attendant and up to five call queues
Configured and tested. More tiers and more queues are an add-on rather than a surprise.
-
Up to one hundred numbers ported
New, migrated or ported to Operator Connect. Larger ranges are scoped separately, because beyond a point porting stops being a task and becomes a workstream.
-
Acceptance testing against a supplied sheet
You get the test sheet, you run the tests, and the results are reviewed against the deployed solution.
-
Optional, priced per item
Handset provisioning, extra auto attendant tiers and call queues, train the trainer and admin training, number range migration, Telstra Business Continuity, Power BI call reporting from the call quality dashboard, and a survivable branch appliance for sites that must keep calling during an internet outage.
What we do and do not do
What it does
-
Deal with Telstra so you do not have to
The paperwork, the provisioning and the escalations, as a Telstra Platinum+ Partner. One point of contact for cloud voice faults through the Horizon365 service desk, by phone, email or the partner portal.
-
Design the call flows and prove them
Auto attendants, call queues, voice policies and number management, documented as built and tested before acceptance.
-
Move the numbers
From the existing carrier to Operator Connect, in planned change windows, with the ranges that cannot be moved identified before the project starts.
What it does not do
-
We do not install handsets on site
Devices are provisioned remotely and somebody of yours plugs them in. Onsite deployment is quoted separately when a site genuinely needs it.
-
We do not supply your Microsoft licensing
You need the right licences for Teams Phone, and audio conferencing is its own line. We will tell you exactly what is required before you commit to anything.
-
We do not train every end user
Training is train the trainer, up to seven champions, plus admin centre training for the people running it afterwards. Whole of organisation training is a different exercise.
-
Meeting rooms are a separate job
Teams Rooms devices are procured and installed as their own project. It is physical work in a room, it has a different buyer, and bundling it into a calling migration is how both end up late.
-
Ongoing support is a separate agreement
Deliberately. The project ends at handover, and day to day management comes through an amendment to your services agreement that you sign knowingly rather than inherit.
Common questions
Do we have to be on Telstra?
For this service, yes. Calling is carried on Telstra Operator Connect, or Telstra Calling for Office 365 where Operator Connect cannot be used. Ericom is a Telstra Platinum+ Partner and has been delivering telephony for over thirty years, which is how faults get escalated and paperwork gets moved when a number range is stuck.
Do we keep our phone numbers?
Almost always. Numbers and ranges move from your existing carrier to Operator Connect. There are occasions where a particular number or range cannot be moved, so we check yours during scoping and tell you before the project starts rather than discovering it at cutover.
What happens to the lift phone?
It gets found, tested and cut over like everything else. Lift, gate and emergency phones, two-way radios, fax machines and intercoms are all part of discovery, and on a large project the adapters for them are more work than configuring the staff. If we cannot see your list of them, that is the first thing we go looking for.
How small is too small?
Not very. A twenty person office is a normal project and takes weeks rather than months, with about ten hours of your time. The size that changes things is not the headcount, it is how many buildings, how many numbers and how much analogue equipment is attached to the old system.
When are you available?
Project work runs Monday to Friday, 8:00am to 6:00pm AEST, excluding Victorian and New South Wales public holidays. Number porting and cutover are the exception and are scheduled after hours by design, because that is when a phone system can be moved without anybody losing a call.
What if Teams goes down?
Telstra Business Continuity for Teams diverts inbound calls to another destination when Teams or the interconnect is unreachable. For sites that have to keep calling through an internet outage, a survivable branch appliance keeps local calling alive on site. Both are optional and both are worth discussing before you need them.
Can we see how the phones are actually being used?
Yes. Call, queue and quality reporting comes from the Microsoft call quality dashboard into Power BI. We set up the connector and show your team how to read it, and you own the reports afterwards.
Start with a list of what is attached
Tell us how many people, how many buildings and roughly how many numbers, and we will tell you what a migration looks like. The useful first conversation is about the lifts, the radios and the fax machine, because that is what decides the size of it.
Book a scoping call