Your organisation runs on Microsoft Teams for collaboration, but your phone calls still happen through a completely separate system. This disconnect forces your team to juggle two different platforms when they should be working seamlessly within a single environment. The assumption that Microsoft Teams phone integration requires abandoning your current telephony infrastructure is preventing many businesses from streamlining their communications.
The Two-Platform Problem
Every day, your employees switch between Teams for meetings and messaging, then move to your existing phone system for client calls and internal communications. This context switching wastes time and creates opportunities for missed connections or duplicated efforts. Important phone conversations happen outside your Teams ecosystem, meaning call records, contact histories, and communication insights remain fragmented across platforms.
Your current phone system holds years of configuration work, established call routing rules, and phone numbers that customers recognise. Meanwhile, Teams contains your organisational structure, project collaborations, and daily workflow patterns. These valuable assets operate in isolation when they should be working together to improve productivity and customer experience.
Training becomes more complex when employees must master multiple communication interfaces instead of working within familiar Teams environments they already understand and prefer.
Direct Routing Preserves Everything
Direct Routing enables Microsoft Teams phone integration by connecting your existing phone system to Teams through intelligent gateways. Your current phone system continues handling calls exactly as before, while Teams gains access to these capabilities through secure connectivity. This approach preserves your established phone numbers, call routing configurations, and existing carrier relationships.
Your team makes and receives calls directly within Teams, but the underlying telephony intelligence comes from your phone system. This means you keep the reliability and features that made you choose your current setup while gaining the integration benefits your Teams-focused workforce needs.
The technical implementation connects your phone system to Microsoft’s cloud through certified gateways that handle the translation between your existing infrastructure and Teams protocols. Your IT team maintains control over telephony policies, security settings, and call management rules while Teams users experience seamless phone functionality.
Mitel Assistant Bridges the Gap
Rather than forcing users to abandon familiar phone system features, Mitel Assistant brings telephony capabilities directly into Teams as an integrated application. Your employees access speed dials, call history, voicemail, and advanced call controls without leaving their Teams workspace.
This Microsoft Teams phone integration approach maintains bi-directional presence synchronisation, so your availability status reflects actual phone activity across both platforms. When you’re on a call through your traditional phone system, Teams automatically shows you as busy, preventing meeting invitations and maintaining accurate availability information.
The assistant provides access to corporate directories, personal contacts, and call management features that teams already know how to use. Advanced functionality like call transfer, conference setup, and voicemail access work identically to your current phone system, eliminating retraining requirements while improving workflow efficiency.
Unify Phone for Simplified Integration
Some organisations prefer embedded experiences where telephony functions become native parts of their Teams environment. Unify Phone serves as a gateway media server that integrates phone capabilities directly into Teams interfaces, creating single-application workflows that eliminate platform switching entirely.
This approach provides comprehensive Microsoft Teams phone integration through familiar Teams interfaces rather than separate phone applications. Your employees dial, answer, and manage calls using Teams controls they already understand, while your existing phone system infrastructure continues providing the underlying service delivery through the Unify Phone gateway.
The unified interface maintains access to advanced telephony features while presenting them through Teams-native controls. Call parking, hunt groups, call queues, and other business features remain available but operate through interfaces that match your Teams experience.
Preserving Investment Value
Your current phone system represents substantial investment in hardware, software licenses, and configuration expertise that shouldn’t be discarded for integration benefits. Effective Microsoft Teams phone integration strategies build on these existing assets rather than replacing them.
Phone numbers your customers know, and use remain unchanged. Internal extensions, speed dial configurations, and call routing rules continue working exactly as configured. Your team’s familiarity with current phone features transfers directly to the integrated experience without requiring comprehensive retraining.
Carrier relationships, trunk configurations, and service level agreements stay in place. You avoid the disruption and expense of changing telephony providers or renegotiating service contracts while gaining modern integration capabilities.
Implementation Without Disruption
The integration process begins with pilot groups who test Teams telephony features while the broader organisation continues using existing phone systems normally. This gradual approach allows you to verify functionality, train users, and resolve any configuration issues before organisation-wide deployment.
Your current phone system continues operating throughout the integration process. Users can choose when to adopt Teams-based calling features rather than being forced to change workflows on specific dates. This flexibility reduces training overhead and allows natural adoption patterns based on individual comfort levels and business needs.
Technical implementation typically involves adding gateway devices that connect your phone system to Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. These gateways handle protocol translation and feature mapping without requiring changes to your existing telephony configuration.
Feature Compatibility Maintained
Advanced phone system features you rely on for business operations remain available through Microsoft Teams phone integration. Auto attendants, call queues, hunt groups, and call recording continue functioning as configured while becoming accessible through Teams interfaces.
Custom call routing rules, time-based forwarding, and department-specific configurations transfer to the integrated environment. Your business processes that depend on specific telephony behaviours continue working without modification or workflow changes.
Integration maintains compatibility with desk phones, conference room systems, and mobile applications your team currently uses. The choice of communication device becomes independent of the integration platform, preserving existing hardware investments.
Measuring Integration Success
Successful Microsoft Teams phone integration can deliver measurable improvements in user productivity, communication efficiency, and overall satisfaction with business tools. Your team spends less time switching between applications and more time focused on productive activities.
Call quality, reliability, and feature availability should match or exceed your current phone system performance. Integration success means gaining Teams benefits without sacrificing telephony capabilities that support your business operations.
The ultimate goal is creating communication experiences that feel natural and efficient rather than complex integrations that require constant user attention. When Microsoft Teams phone integration works properly, your team stops thinking about which platform handles which communication tasks and focuses instead on getting work done effectively.
Ready to integrate? Reach out to our team today to chat through your requirements in further detail.
