If you really want to run a phone company managed by your IT organization, then you’re reading the wrong eBook. If, like the rest of us, you would rather focus on enabling your users to succeed, be productive, and communicate globally with ease, then read on.

There are two main approaches to providing voice capabilities to Teams. The first is to use an app bot requiring users to learn new commands to initiate Team calls or join meetings. This approach disrupts the regular Teams workflow and creates user apathy and confusion. There are also some nasty user training implications of this approach we will discuss in a bit, but the administration can be messy because it requires installing and configuring those bots on every desktop or smartphone.

The second is to use Microsoft Teams Direct Routing. This may be more complicated on the back end, but there is no reason your voice for Teams vendor should share that complexity with you.

With a cloud vendor, you should expect no Teams downtime to bring voice services online or port telephone numbers, and users should be able to keep their existing phone numbers.

The bottom line is that when adding voice to a Microsoft Teams environment, you can have your cake (full functionality) and eat it too (low complexity of deployment).

Option Two is the direct routing approach that fully embeds telephony inside the Microsoft Teams app, desktop or mobile, lighting up the Microsoft Teams native dialer. It also enables native use of features like ring groups, calling queues, call forwarding, and voicemail. Users need no additional training for this approach. The downside? It is going to be slightly more expensive on a per user basis when compared with the bot approach but will result in much fewer end user calls to the IT support desk. The bottom line is that this approach is designed for mid-market to enterprise class organizations and is going to be more cost effective for mid to large scale implementations.

If you don’t have a call center, this point is moot. But if you do have a call center and are using Microsoft Teams as well, of course you would want to natively support ring groups and calling queues as well as the ability to have full call analytics while your users are dialing from the Microsoft dialer. Make sure to consider how your call center app and analytics are integrated with Teams.

As with any technology decision, you need to consider the pros and cons of each approach, and how it will fit with your environment. Think about your needs first, and then determine which technological approach outlined above will be best for your environment.