Challenge
As T-Tech continue to take on a flexible, agile, and modern work ethic, staying connected with colleagues needs to be easy and effortless. A shared hub for different departments and staff to collaborate and communicate with each other, is what T-Tech realised they were missing.
We all know the pain of the infinite inbox – it seems like we spend a lot of our lives answering emails upon emails, leaving minimal time to get work done. Teams takes away from this, and our vision for adopting this is so that our inboxes become client focused, and then all internal communications are in Teams.
On top of this, the pains of having disparate systems for chat, phones, collaboration, documents, and conference calling, is confusing and costly, so T-Tech wanted to find a solution that could bring all these elements together. We see it with our clients all the time; systems are isolated, meaning separate upkeep and costs for each of these things. Opening a meeting can be laboured with different dial ins and video set up. Collaborating with peers should be easy and centralised, leading to improved communication, ultimately resulting in the work getting done in a more efficient manner.
Vision
Being modern workplace evangelists, T-Tech like to make the most out of the 20+ applications available within the Office 365 suite. After decommissioning Skype for Business, T-Tech began using Microsoft Teams in 2018, as a work-based collaboration and chat tool. The path from Skype for Business to Teams, ultimately initiated an array of opportunities for T-Tech.
Wanting to reduce the number of emails being sent and received, the 5 pillars became necessary requirements to achieving the entire unified comms vision.
The vision breakdown:
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Collaboration --> be able to create collaborative communities based on service line, interest areas, processes, event organising, and so on
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Chat --> have a central place to communicate with team members and the wider community on a secure platform other than email. Something hasty and efficient as an alternative to firing off emails and never looking at them or hearing back
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Voice and Telephony --> no need for a separate phone system or telecoms provider. This will be integrated within the platform and used as a normal telephone system.
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Video and voice conferencing --> remove the inconvenience of unsecure web links to start a call, with multiple emails sharing pin numbers
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Documents --> get rid of shared drives because they are too hard to collaborate; lots of documents and different versions of the same thing saved everywhere
The opportunity to streamline all communications through Microsoft Teams meant T-Tech was opening itself up to a fully collaborative work style, with an included phone system, wrapped in enterprise security, compliance, and manageability.
Solution
As the possibilities for integrating other applications within Teams became available, T-Tech decided to revolutionise the state of their telephony system and the project soon evolved into a full migration to Microsoft Teams, with the integration of a telephony system.
This involved the opportunity to move away from the traditional desk phone system, and to a more modern solution of hosting and directing all calls through Microsoft Teams (the system works just as a normal phone system would), as well as using it as a platform for working and chatting with colleagues. Operating from laptop, mobile, or tablet, T-Tech can now make calls with the keypad in the app, the same as a phone keypad. It makes joining meetings from any device completely seamless, as it is all cloud based, all wrapped in the trusted Microsoft security features. With the added bonus of some fancy office hardware to enrich the user experience, T-Tech have fully invested in this project to maximise performance, agility, and productivity.
T-Tech users initially started testing calls internally, operating entirely through Microsoft Teams, moving away from the historic phone system. Testing took a few months, as the technical team developed the solution fully. Now, the project is complete, and T-Tech are making and receiving all calls internally and externally, through the Teams app on all devices.
As well as this, the remaining 4 pillars are also collectively in action:
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Collaboration and chat --> All internal communications are functioning in different channels in Teams, making it easy for staff members to interact and collaborate, whether they are on site at a client, in the office, or working from home.
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Voice and video conferencing --> T-Tech no longer have a conference bridge or send web links for video and voice conferencing – with one click of a button in Teams, meeting joining times have been significantly reduced, and the features it brings is making meetings a satisfying and effortless experience.
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Documents --> full document management integration means that T-Tech can now share and edit documents with multiple people using the document at the same time; everything is saved centrally in Teams making things much easier to find; and you can share ideas with comments on documents, giving people calls to action in real time.
Outcome
Overall the deployment of unified communications and an integrated telephony system within Teams has been a big success for T-Tech. The creation of this solution has given T-Tech a whole new edge and has introduced a new phase to the business. The admin behind work that often takes up more of our days than we’d like (i.e. joining a conference call with a pin number or sending the 7th version of a contract via email) has been completely eliminated and simplified.
Daniel Teacher, Managing Director at T-Tech has commented: “Many businesses have some very good voice, video, and collaboration solutions, but often these are significantly underutilised because they are not easy, and a best of bread product is not cheap. We have developed a solution that is easy to use, simple, and we are pleased to be one of the first to market with this kind of solution.”