Simon Telephonics Teams Gateway connects Teams clients to FreePBX as normal extensions. This isn’t a managed phone service or PBX; it’s a connector so that you can use Teams with your own FreePBX the same way you would use any extension.
A major benefit of Teams in this role, other than direct integration with the existing Office environment, is secure, encrypted calling both on the desktop and on mobile.
Let me know if you’d like to try it free for a month.
Normally we are in the mode of sharing free advice and solutions on this forum, and I recognize that. You can build a do-it-yourself Teams SBC! I have seen a lot of discussion on mailing lists related to other open-source VoIP software on this topic. However, it is not for the faint of heart, which is why I think some folks might be interested in our gateway service.
Feel free to reach out on this post with questions, opinions, criticisms and the like.
There are discussions on this forum every day about softphone solutions and I just wanted to raise this as an option you should consider – especially if you are an Office 365 organization. If you are, you already have a very capable, secure softphone installed on your computer and likely on your mobile device. If you want to see how well Teams and FreePBX integrate, I want to give you the opportunity to try it free and then decide about longer-term use, so please reach out and let me know.
We are no longer selling the Teams SBC service but are considering releasing build documentation for DIY purposes. The solution works well, but the main deterrent I heard from numerous discussions with potential customers and associates was that the Microsoft end-user licensing for each Teams client is too high. I agree. The retail cost is $8/user/month for the Teams license in order to do Direct Routing (SIP) calling.
That said, if you use Teams and really want the integration, it may make sense.
Thanks to the several of you who wrote and inquired.
We were actually very recently considering integrating MS Teams. Can you please elaborate as why it needs to be an SBC/SIP router and not a standard SIP server?
Also, I heard that it’s hard to keep up with MS’s server addresses, is that true? If not, whats the hardest part here (other than the licensing cost)?
It’s a matter of semantics. What’s an SBC other than a SIP server (back-to-back user agent) that serves some kind of access control purpose? (maybe transcoding too)
The main issue is that Asterisk’s SIP stacks do not implement all parts of the protocol that Microsoft uses. MS is not doing anything outside the standard as far as I can tell.
They have infrequently added a couple new addresses. Everything is handled with DNS so I am not sure what would be the concern here.
Depends on what you are familiar with. For me it’s dealing with the MS Powershell scripts needed to administer Teams users for Direct Routing. You can do almost all the other Microsoft stuff through the web-based admin console.
Would love to have this as well. Licensing is not an issue with us since Direct Routing is already available with the Microsoft 365 E5 License we use.
@billsimon I notice your company is offering FreePBX Images on AWS? Right now we’re running FreePBX on AWS already using a self-built AMI, would love to use your supported Images if Teams Integration would be available there.
The PowerShell commands seem pretty straightforward for me, already tried another SBC Product, but would love to have Teams as regular FreePBX Extension Softphones so we can keep Routing, Queues etc. in FreePBX as this functionality in Teams itself is quite rudimentary…
