Teams telephony migration

When Microsoft formally announced an ‘end of life’ date of 2024 for our organisation’s Skype for Business calling features, our I.T department were tasked with migrating our entire workforce over to a new home.

The solution was to integrate telephony features into Microsoft Teams, which would make the software the council’s main and only ‘Intelligent Communications’ tool. This means that our workforce would be able to complete tasks more efficiently and participate in more productive meetings.

With over 500 employees at Ashford Borough Council, the migration had to be a phased approach across each department with a thorough testing process to ensure call quality met our expectations and complimented our existing flexible and hybrid working strategy.

As part of the project, we also moved our telephone lines from ISDN 30, to SIP Trunking. Use of ISDN 30 ends in 2025, and the amount of support available if something goes wrong is already getting harder to find. SIP trunking will future proof our telephone systems and help to improve the organisation’s resilience against growing cyber threats.

Successfully completed in October 2022, it now means that the council are ahead of schedule with Skype’s end of life plans and crucially it won’t affect our ability to communicate, assist and transact with our residents around the borough.