Microsoft Teams natively supports Office 365 Calling Plans – so if you are located in a country where Microsoft is able to provide dial-in and dial-out numbers you might already be set, and your users will be able to easily make PSTN calls from their Teams client.

But let’s assume you want to enable your business to take advantage of Microsoft’s Teams amazing collaboration capabilities but need to retain your on-premise SIP trunk – this is where Direct Routing can help you achieve your goals. Enterprises might need to retain their SIP trunk for multiple reasons – this could be due to legacy system connectivity that needs to be retained, or complex routing scenarios not supported by Microsoft Calling Plans natively.

Direct Routing allows you to connect your Teams collaboration spaces to a certified Session Border Controller (SBC). In turn this SBC will connect to the PSTN through your telecom provider; usually via a SIP trunk but there might be other options available. Like with Calling Plans, your users will then be able to make calls from their Teams client to any phone number in the world, or just in your local area, depending on your individual business requirements. Unlike with Calling Plans, you have much greater control of how those calls are routed, and can also deploy multiple SIP trunks connected to multiple SBCs.

In order to set up Direct Routing there are a number of steps necessary: first of all setting up or modifying your SBC configuration to support Direct Routing; configuring your Office 365 tenant to talk to your on-premise or cloud SBC; ensuring connectivity, certificates, DNS records and related requirements are in place; and last not least testing the path from a Teams client connected to your O365 tenant to the public phone system through your telco provider, and vice versa.

AudioCodes is the leading provider of Session Border Controllers certified for Direct Routing. vNext IQ has partnered with both Microsoft and AudioCodes and will be able to help you on your journey to Microsoft Teams, Unified Communications and Direct Routing.