Does your small to medium business/org need a phone system, now that more\most\all people are working from home? Or even if they aren’t, this is a great offering!

Microsoft has had a virtual PBX\digital phone system, built on Skype for Business for years now. This support was moved into Microsoft Teams around a year ago, as Skype for Business is phased out\replaced by Teams. But the licensing of this support was a confusing (I struggled to get it all working and had to phone a friend). It required an Office 365 E1 or E3 license with three additional licensed added on, or an E5 license. This new offering works with the cheaper “Office 365 Business” licenses, designed for business with under 300 users.

Today Microsoft just launched “Microsoft 365 Business Voice” in the US. It’s a $20/month add-on per line, with the base license being $5/month so $25/month.

It is built on Microsoft Team, which provide chat, conference call lines, video conferencing,  desktop sharing, webinar “live events”, and a virtual PBX\phone system support. The phone system support auto attendants, call queues, call parking, and many more advanced PBX type options.

You can sign up for a 30-day trial, which normally can be extended to 60 days, for everything for FREE during this period.

So for $20 Microsoft 365 Business Voice replaces the following thee licenses, which saves you $2 and this option is now available for Office 365 Business Essentials ($5/month) vs the previous cheapest offer of E1 ($8/month); saving a total of $5/month per user.

• $12 Microsoft 365 Domestic Calling Plan – Required to make outgoing calls
• $8 Microsoft Phone System – Required to connect to (PSTN) external phones
• $2 Audio Conference – Required for a user to host a conference call

I used this support, via the old licensing method, for a eight hour virtual meeting\webinar on Saturday to provide phone support to over 750 people. The help desk team provided over 21 hours of phone support, and answered 226 calls. The system worked pretty flawlessly. You can use the Teams app on your smart phone or computer to make\receive calls using a real #.