8x8 Adds Integrated Business Messaging to Microsoft Teams

8x8, acloud communications platform provider, added short message service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS) and fax capabilities to the 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams app.

8x8's global direct routing solution now provides telephony plus digital communication features to organizations adopting Teams for collaboration.

"For organizations that use Microsoft Teams, Direct Routing delivers not only voice call cost efficiencies but also a better end-user experience. The benefits are essentially a best-of-breed approach to a holistic unified communications, collaboration, and customer engagement solution," said Denise Lund, research director for telecom and unified communications at IDC, in a statement. "The new 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams app enables a seamless end-user experience when it comes to calling, integrated messaging, like SMS, MMS, and fax, and other converged communication capabilities, which are easily accessible by employees from inside their familiar Teams collaboration solution."

The 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams app is available for download at the Microsoft AppSource. It empowers employees to use and manage 8x8 features from any Teams endpoint, including integrated business messaging, individual or group voicemail, call queue management, and self-service access.

8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams delivers direct routing capabilities that allow Teams users to make and receive calls on the public switched telephone network (PSTN) natively from any Teams endpoint. 8x8 Global Reach, which includes regional, Microsoft-certified session border controllers (SBC) across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, enables organizations using Teams for collaboration to access PSTN services and global calling plans in more than 43 countries. Other key features include the following:

• Unlimited global calling plans to up to 47 countries;
• Integration with 8x8 Contact Center for Microsoft Teams;
• Out-of-the-box integration with more than 25 third-party business applications, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365, to automatically log all calls and attach details, recordings, and speech analytics to any customer record; and
• Full telephony and contact center reporting and analytics into call quality, performance metrics, activity history, and speech analytics.

"As organizations with a distributed workforce rapidly adopt Microsoft Teams for collaboration, enabling employees to use and manage advanced communications and customer engagement features directly from any Teams endpoint is critical," said Dejan Deklich, chief product officer of 8x8, in a statement. "With 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams, organizations can free up IT resources to drive their business objectives, while also providing employees the ability to interact with colleagues and customers from anywhere using Teams."

"Our staff are dedicated to ensuring that every clients' expectations are surpassed, whether they work in the office or remotely. We use Microsoft Teams for internal collaboration and needed a cloud communications solution that routed external calls to employees and not to our offices," said Rino Lampasona, vice president of finance at Muraflex, a manufacturer of glass partitions, in a statement. "By deploying 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams we get peace of mind with enhanced employee productivity and client engagement. Our staff can work from anywhere on any device to collaborate, communicate, and engage as well as manage 8x8 features, all from their Teams app."