As someone who has written a fair amount of marketing copy in my day, this may end up being a little bit awkward.
I’m going to call out marketers for being, well, marketers. Don’t worry, I’m not going to shake out the rug of marketing jargon too roughly.
I am just going to focus on one corner of the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market that needs a little bit of a good cleaning and clarification.
Marketers love using the term “native” to describe their product because it leaves little room for something to go wrong. Think about how every additional moving part means more chances for failure to rear its ugly head. But when a product is native, it just works. Pure simplicity and productivity.
But when it comes to native direct routing in Microsoft Teams, some product offerings out there may not be quite as native as they would like to appear to be and use a lot of smoke and mirrors.
To get to the bottom of this, let’s take a look at what exactly do we mean by native direct routing for Microsoft Teams and what are some of the differences between a real native solution and one where the jargon is carrying more of the load here.
Defining Native vs Non-Native Microsoft Teams
The basic concept of direct routing in Microsoft Teams is that these solutions allow you to connect your PSTN to the Microsoft Office 365 network or environment. This lets your organization make voice calls via your Azure cloud service.
In a truly native Microsoft Teams solution, your UCaaS provider is approved and certified by Microsoft to actually connect your PSTN into the Office 365 network as a native partner. This allows you to leverage the phone system license within Microsoft and enjoy the full host of familiar benefits like call forwarding, auto attendant, call transfer, voicemail, etc. No daylight, and no middleware in between.
Alternatively, a UCaaS vendor that has to use a third-party vendor to facilitate the connectivity between the UCaaS solution and Teams is going to have a harder time calling themselves native since they have that extra layer sitting between them and your Microsoft environment.
With this definition in mind, what does this matter for the end user?
Pros & Cons of Native vs Non-Native Microsoft Teams
On the face of it for your average user, they should be able to make their calls regardless of whether their UCaaS provider is giving them real native Teams solution.
But once we start to dive into the details is where our story begins to fray.
This is because every aspect of the non-native alternative seems to require one more extra step. And like Columbo, it’s always that “one more thing” where the best laid plans come apart.
For starters, in the non-native arrangement, everything from your auto attendant to your voicemail have to be managed in a separate portal because, again, they are not sitting natively in Microsoft. You even need to have a separate mobile app for your voice calls.
All of these are small inconveniences that can pile up to a bigger annoyance when compared with the native option where everything is managed under a single portal and syncs right to your Outlook and Microsoft environment without the extra steps in the middle. This gap can mean a lot for the IT team that needs to manage your organization’s direct routing and a bad experience for your employees.
Probably the biggest difference is less about how the experience is when everything is working smoothly, but how it plays out when it goes wrong.
Service and Support When it Counts
Remember how we mentioned the issue of more moving parts equaling more opportunities for problems?
When your vendor is not a native direct routing partner with Microsoft and the solution does not sit inside of Microsoft’s servers, then Microsoft’s support engineers are going to have reduced visibility that can lead them to be less effective. Simply put, they only have partial observability over the parts within their purview. They cannot see what is happening as well outside in your vendor and your vendor’s middleware.
“A key advantage that we are able to offer our customers as a native Teams solution provider is that close working relationship with Microsoft,” says William Rubio, CallTower’s Chief Revenue Officer, to UC Today in explaining the. “This means that when an issue arises, we know who is going to pick up the call on Microsoft’s end and help us to get back to operating smoothly fast.”
One question that comes up frequently is about outages, with some voicing the idea that an advantage to a non-native alternative is that you can still have calling if Microsoft goes down.
This claim strikes me as a bit odd for two reasons.
First, if Microsoft is down, then you have bigger problems and you cannot take advantage of all the connectivity of UCaaS that brought you to manage your calling there in the first place. You might as well use your cellphone at that point.
Second is that you are more likely to have issues come up with your additional moving parts of extra vendors and middleware than you are with Microsoft with all of its redundancies.
And in the event that Teams does go down, a native Microsoft Teams solutions partner has its own sets of backups to keep the calls flowing without interruption.
CallTower, Rubio says, works with MetaSwitch (acquired by Microsoft in 2020) as a failover. “So, if MSFT has an outage,” he explains, “Our customers simply have their calls automatically and seamlessly rerouted via MetaSwitch without even feeling the handover.”
Similar options for redundancies are available if you are using a non-native Teams solution through another provider, but tacking on a backup for when the lines go down is probably going to cost you extra so that is worth taking into account.
How to Tell if You Are Using Native Teams Solution
If you are not sure about if your UCaaS vendor is really offering you native direct routing or operator connect, you can check to see if your voicemails are syncing to Outlook and if additional portals are needed for carrying out many of the basic changes and configurations.
Alternatively, you can just go right to the source and ask Microsoft. They will tell you who their Native partners are, and who is not.
Moving Towards the Operator Connect Future
While this debate over native vs non-native direct routing has value for administrators and their organizations, many are starting to look at what is next.
Operator Connect is the most recently announced option for voice calling to come down the pipe. You can read a deeper dive comparing it with direct routing here for the nitty gritty details. But the short version is that while less flexible than direct routing, it makes it very easy for administrators to make all their changes and configurations inside of Teams while keeping with their current service providers.
You can understand it as a tightening of an already close relationship between the voice provider like CallTower with Microsoft, with its benefits for the consumer.
In describing their development of the Operator Connect initiative within CallTower, Rubio notes that they are part of the Microsoft Azure Peering Service (MAPS) networking service.
“What that means is that we are within the same data centers as Microsoft, whether it be the same floor, or one floor above,” he says, meaning that, “We are giving you that direct connection into the Microsoft Office 365 environment, which makes for better service and experience for our joint customers.”
from UC Today https://ift.tt/JCuzf3H
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