Integrate 8x8 with Microsoft Teams: in just three steps

By Clare Collins,Unified Communications Sales Specialist at Virgin Media Business.

“Integration can make or break remote communication.”

These were the words of my colleague Duncan Finlay in one of his recent articles.

And I couldn’t agree more.

As organisations race to adapt to new ways of working, they’re adopting more and more cloud-based tools, apps and systems to empower employees to operate from anywhere.

If those technologies don’t work smoothly together, you risk creating more complexity, more confusion, and ultimately a poor experience for your employees and your customers.

Get it right, however, and you can dramatically improve the way your people work, whether remotely, in the office or a mix of both, boosting productivity and engagement.

So I want to share a step-by-step walkthrough on integrating your 8x8 platform with one of the world’s most popular business messaging platforms: Microsoft Teams.

Teams is arguably one of the biggest technology success stories of the pandemic.

In March this year the platform had 44 million global users.

By April it had 75 million.

That’s a 70% increase in the space of just one month.

And its growth hasn’t slowed since then.

As of October the service had 115 million daily active users and counting – 95 million more than it had this time last year.

Clearly a lot of organisations rely on Teams for effective remote working. And you can see why. It’s a solid platform for collaborating with colleagues and sharing information. It offers plenty of useful telephony features like ring groups, call queues and call transferring. And it’s easy to install and use, even if you’re far from a technical expert.

The good news is you can still use Teams as your main communication platform and get all the benefits of 8x8 voice technology.

Your 8x8 voice tools integrate with Teams using the direct routing capability built into Microsoft’s own phone system, creating a cloud-to-cloud connection between the two.

So your employees can keep on using their Teamsapp on their desktop or mobile, but all that voice data gets carried over 8x8’s network.

Unlike other solutions that need you to install a third-party app, download a browser extension or even learn new commands to initiate calls, 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams requires no end user intervention or end user installation.

All it takes to get going is three simple steps:

1. Authorise 8x8 to work with your Microsoft phone system

2. Connect your phone system to your Microsoft Teams domain

3. Synchronise your Teams and 8x8 accounts

I’ll cover these steps in a little more detail.

But first…

A user/login to your Office 365 account with Global Admin rights
Microsoft Phone System licence add-ons (or E5 licences) for the end-users of the service
Administrative Access to your 8x8 Account
Ideally, one or two spare Office 365 user licenses such as Business Essentials/Premium or E1/E3/E5, for a few hours during the initial setup. These are only required during the initial setup

Now let’s look at the three steps I mentioned.

First thing to do is verify the login and administrator credentials for your organisation’s 8x8 account.

Then check that all user accounts have the following configured in their profile:

X1 – X8 licences assigned
Phone number and extension assigned
MS Teams integration enabled

For this step you need to head to the 8x8
Voice for Microsoft Teams Admin Portal and do the following:

Set the service options

Enter a service name – 8x8, for example – along with your country and state/province
Enable synchronisation to allow 8x8 to connect with Microsoft Teams

Enable the Microsoft Teams service

Select the Microsoft Teams administrator account, authenticate, accept permissions and begin synchronisation

The final step is to confirm that the 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams service has been properly implemented. Then the synchronisation between 8x8 and Teams can begin.

The 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams portal maps your Teams users with your 8x8 accounts, based on their email address
After that, the portal will display all users who are ready and able to use 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams

Our experts can help you choose the right 8x8 solution for your organisation based on what you’ve already got in place and what you want to achieve. And they can help you configure it the right way too.