What actually is Teams Phone? After episodes on voice apps, the Queues app and full contact centres, Ben and Zach finally go back to the beginning.

In episode twelve of 365 Explained, Zach takes the lead and covers Teams Phone from the ground up:

◆ What a PBX is, and why Teams Phone is one living in the cloud

◆ The four ways to get phone lines into Teams — Calling Plans, Direct Routing, Operator Connect and Teams Phone Mobile — and how to pick between them

◆ Emergency calling and the regulatory side, plus where to check country coverage

◆ Licensing: Teams Phone Standard, the bit you might already own in E5, and Shared Calling

◆ The PBX table stakes — hold, transfers, forwarding, multi-line, presence-based routing and cloud voicemail

◆ SIP Gateway for keeping older handsets (and the phone on the warehouse wall) working

◆ What happens when the internet goes down: SBAs, redundant ISPs and satellite backups

◆ Copilot in Teams Phone — Teams Phone agent, Copilot call delegation, mid-call Copilot and AI transfer summaries

Whether you've inherited a Teams Phone estate or you're staring at a PBX contract renewal wondering if there's a better way, this is the grounding episode.

We say 101, but naturally it gets complicated fairly quickly.

What's carrying your calls today: Calling Plans, Operator Connect, Direct Routing, or a PBX that refuses to die? Let us know.

#TeamsPhone #MicrosoftTeams #Microsoft365 #Copilot #365Explained

What is Power Automate, really, and why should an IT Pro care when it’s usually pitched at citizen developers?

In episode eleven of 365 Explained, Ben and Zach look at Power Automate from the admin’s side of the fence.

We cover:

• How triggers, actions and connectors fit together
• Cloud flows, desktop flows and generative flows
• When a personal flow should probably become an Azure Logic App
• Power Platform environments and why they matter
• Standard and premium connectors
• The Workflows app in Teams and its slightly confusing AI workflows
• How Power Automate supports parts of Copilot Studio and agent flows

Whether you’re new to Power Automate or you’ve been using flows without looking too closely at what sits underneath them, this is our attempt at a 101.

We say 101, but naturally it gets complicated fairly quickly.

What are you automating with Power Automate, and where do you draw the line between a personal flow and a proper business process? Let us know.

#PowerAutomate #PowerPlatform #Microsoft365 #CopilotStudio #365Explained

Recorded live at CommsvNext in Denver, Colorado. Ben and Zach are joined by Oli Lifely from Luware to talk about what happens when native Teams call queues aren't enough and you need a full contact center.

In this episode, we cover:

• The three Microsoft certification models for contact center integration: Connect, Extend, and the newly renamed Unify
• How each model handles the call differently — from SIP trunk hairpinning to Graph API signalling
• What a contact center adds beyond Queues App: skills-based routing, cradle-to-grave reporting, omni-channel, and outbound
• Where AI fits beyond chatbots — proactive SLA monitoring, natural language workflow configuration, and automated remediation
• The biggest mistakes organisations make when migrating off legacy PBXs to Teams

Whether you're hitting the limits of Queues App or planning a move off Avaya, Mitel, or Cisco, this one's for you.