August 26, 2016
Cisco WebEx Teams isn’t just a collaboration tool, it’s every collaboration tool in one powerful solution. From persistent meetings to chat, file sharing, telepresence, and more, WebEx Teams is more than just an application. It is a complete collaboration platform. Yet, there’s one feature that doesn’t get quite as much attention as it should. Teams can also serve as a standalone public branch exchange (PBX) hosted in the cloud. While this is a valuable feature for organizations of all sizes, it could be particularly beneficial for a small-to-medium business (SMB) looking to transition their phone system away from a standard on-premise solution.
Replace Your PBX with Cisco WebEx Teams
- Cisco 7800, 8800 Series, or Soft Phones: The SMB has options when considering what hardware they wish to use for their new phone system. Existing or new Cisco 7800 or 8800 Series phones can be connected to the Teams OS without issue. Alternatively, if the company does not wish to invest in voice hardware at this time, they can still make calls using a soft phone on their laptop or PC.
- No Data Center Infrastructure to Support: WebEx Teams as a whole is hosted in the cloud. That means that a company can access every feature of the platform from their standard internet connection. This includes spaces, video meetings, screen sharing, file sharing, and—yes—the PBX voice system. This is a boon for the SMB whose small IT teams already have their hands full providing tech support and keeping the rest of the environment afloat.
- Reliability and Resiliency: As a cloud-based solution, WebEx Teams is immune to many of the same reliability and resiliency issues that face other voice systems. In the event of a severe storm, flood, fire, or other disaster, the Teams platform will still be fully operational.
- Scalability: Sometimes technology solutions can seem like an obstacle to growth. As the company expands, the technology must be able to grow alongside it in an affordable, non-disruptive way. With WebEx Teams, the IT team need only to install new endpoints and purchase new licenses online. Grow your deployment by one account or by 1000 without impacting the rest of your environment.
Plus, You Also Get Cisco WebEx Teams
It’s easy to focus on one aspect of Cisco WebEx Teams and lose sight of the complete package. As a cloud-hosted voice system, Teams can bring a lot of value to an SMB, but as a collaboration platform, it can bring so much more.
WebEx Teams provides a persistent meeting space, called a space, which enables a team to stay organized on a project. They can upload files, share updates, hold voice or video meetings, and record those meetings in just a few clicks. What was once kept together by disparate files, folders, and emails is now safely housed in a single space where anyone on the team can access it at any time and on any device.
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