I love the convenience that technology provides.  How was I able to suffer through life before my phone provided me with an alternate route around the accident ahead?  I’ve got the lights in my house set to turn on at sunset and the front door unlocks when I approach with my hands full.  We live in a very connected world where we expect things to be easier.  It only makes sense that my desk phone would work with the real-time communications available in my collaboration software.

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Yealink T56A and T58A phones sport a Microsoft Teams client that makes it super simple to join a conference call or reach out to someone on my team for a phone call.  The Yealink CP960 offers the same functionality for conference rooms.  It’s easy to get used to the convenience of tapping on a Teams meeting to join.  This functionality is provided by information in the Office 365 cloud.  The Yealink phones route use the Microsoft Phone System to process calls.  A session border controller (SBC) that is certified for Phone System Direct Routing can be used to connect SIP trunks and connect calls to external recipients through the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

But what happens when connectivity to the Microsoft Phone System is interrupted?  The phones can no longer rely on the Phone System to process calls.  Ribbon and Yealink have thought about this scenario and have tested the use of Ribbon SBCs as a secondary registrar so that calls can be placed in the event that the connection to the Phone System is interrupted.

Should this happen, I can tap a button on the phone to switch from the Teams interface to a dial pad and make calls through the SBC.  It’s nice to have a backup plan, but this functionality can also serve as a plan for the future.  When companies make purchase plans for desktop phones it makes sense to buy phones for all of their employees at once.  Buying in bulk can save money.  This doesn’t always fit nicely into their plans to move to the calling capabilities in Microsoft Teams.  Microsoft recommends moving users in groups, not all at once.  This could leave you with the choice of waiting until everyone is using Teams for calling before deploying the new phones.  The Ribbon/Yealink integration provides the opportunity to deploy the phones to everyone, using the Teams interface for those that are using Teams calling capabilities and using the dial pad for those that have yet to migrate.  This way you can enjoy the full benefit of your new phones right away.  Now that’s convenient!