How to use Microsoft Teams for calling (when integrated with Panasonic phone systems):

Hello and welcome to this video, today we are going to go through using Teams calling, when Teams is integrated with the Panasonic phone system. I’m going to run over some quick features to be able to enable you to make calls, receive calls, how to add your contacts and also how to use conferencing and some other features in the Teams clients.

So I’m going to open up my Teams client here. As you can see here, I have got my Teams client on my desktop PC. All of these setting also do work on your mobile. So the great thing about this being a native integration, it is on your desktop PC and also on your mobile, without having to install any sort of third party applications.

So, as we can see on the left hand side here, we do have our normal Chat, Teams and Calendar tiles down the left hand side. We can also see that we’ve also got this one called calls. So, I’m gonna click on the one [tile] that says calls [left hand side] and as you can see that’s brought up a dial pad and it has also brought up my call history as well. These are all incoming and outgoing calls, and it also shows me any missed calls, so if I’ve got any calls that I’ve might have missed whilst I was away from my desk, I can see them in here and go and call those users back. So, what we’ll do is let me just call another handset that I have sitting next to me and we can have a look at what it looks like to call someone.

So, if we hit ‘Call’, we can see that it brings up the Teams call window, and it looks like I’m making a normal Teams call, as I would be if I was calling another user on Teams. Now, I’m just gonna mute my microphone here – just showing you there’s that control – but also we’ll get some horrible feedback back if we leave the other microphone on as I have the other device right next to me. We can see who we are on with, so I’m on with extension 413 which is my test handset. And, you can also see that there is no hang-up button. So, if I want to disconnect this call, and finish with this call, I would literally just hit ‘Leave’ [top right] up here. Of course you’ve got your short keys as well, where it is built into the Teams client to terminate that call.

Now, say for example this call went through to an IVR or somewhere I need to put an option in, so that’s where you need to press 1 for sales or 2 for support, I would open up my dial pad here [top right, left of the ‘Leave’ button] and then I could just dial up my digits like I would do normally. Once I’m done with that, I would just hit the little ‘X’ up the top and then that would just go away, and you can just carry on using the other features that are in here as well.

If we come up to our three little dots in the [top right] corner, again like normal in Teams you’ve got your Device Settings. These are of course key. You need to make sure of course your speakers and your microphone are set up correctly, so make sure it’s coming out of your headset – if that’s the configuration that you’ve got – or it’s coming out your laptop, make sure it’s not coming out of your screens if that’s not where you need it from. You can change these in the call as well, and it’s live to update so we can go through and change these if we needed to. And once we’ve done with that, we can also hit the ‘X’ and go back into the three little dots.

If we needed to place this call onto hold [hit the ‘Hold’ option under the three dots], which I’ll do now. So I’ve now placed this call onto hold, I might need to go away and do something and then come back to this user and I don’t want this user listening to the conversation I might need to be having with another user so, I can place them on hold. If I need to resume that call, then we just hit ‘Resume’ at the top.

Other features we’ve got here, we’ve got Transfer. So ‘Transfer’, and ‘Consult then transfer’ are two different things. Transfer will just blindly transfer this call to someone. So, say for example I know that this call needs to go into my auto-attendant because they’ve dialled the wrong option, they need to go back in and select option. I can literally just hit ‘Transfer’, and then I could dial my [your] voicemail. Of course this will be different for your system, of course speak to your representative to ask what your voicemail number is. We can select that down there as well, and then I’m just going to hit ‘Transfer’. So, this call would then be transferred, this call would then look to terminate on my side and on my other device I am now listening to my voicemail that is sitting there, as well.

So another thing we’ve got here as well, if we go back into making a phone call on here. We’re just going to make another call to that same user we just did. There we go. And I’ll just show you the difference of Consult and transfer. So, if we just open up ‘Consult and transfer’ – again it is giving me my options around my other people on Teams. Of course, I don’t want to call them because I’ve got a PSTN call here, I need to be able to call a phone number. So I’m going to call back into my voicemail, we’re going to talk to my voicemail and then I will complete the transfer. We’re just going to call my voicemail. The other call is on hold, you’ll hear the voicemail answer. And then I hit that ‘Transfer’ button to complete that transfer. I didn’t bother talking there because it would have been over the voice of the auto-attendant. So that’s how we do a consult and transfer. That’s called a warm transfer if you want to speak to that other person at that time.

What we’re going to do now is if I just call back over to this user. I’m just going to answer this call one more time. Now, another thing I might need to do is, I might need to add another party into this call. This could be an internal party, an extension, it could be an external party that I needed to add into it. So, if I need to do that I can add more people in by hitting ‘Show participants’ and then I need to dial their number. If I dial – again, I’m going to dial our good old friend, the voicemail here. If I wanted to dial an external number, I could dial an external number here as well, in the same fashion. I’m just going to dial out voicemail and I’m going to hit ‘Add phone’.

Now, what that’s going to do is go away and call that other device, and then warn me. So that’s now brought this call in so I’m just going to terminate that. So – as you can see – that added that user into that call, and I was able to have a three-way conversation. Of course it has warned me that that has happened as well.

What I’m going to go through and do now is make an inbound call to this user. I’m just going to call this Teams user and show you how it works like a normal Teams call. So, you can see down here that I’ve got this normal Teams call coming through. Of course, I can either reject it, or I can accept it, so I’m going to accept it. And we get that same pop up window.

So, this is where it just goes to show, this was also ringing on my mobile at the same time. It is exactly the same as what you would see normally when you get a Teams call in there as well. So I’m just going to leave that call and terminate that call. Perfect.

The next thing is around forwarding. So of course sometimes I might, for whatever reason, need to forward it to a mobile – a GSM mobile – rather than my app on my phone, or another user. Or, I might want to forward my calls to voicemail as well. Now, down here in the left hand corner, you can see you’ve got your ‘Forward’ settings. At the moment it’s set to do not forward. Now, if we were to select ‘Forward to voicemail’, on most of the systems that we have – especially with the Panasonic – we tend to turn off the Teams voicemail. The reason for that is the Teams voicemail will override any other voicemail setting and will create further problems with it. This is something that Microsoft are aware of, with all integration systems, with all phone systems, so we don’t tend to use Teams voicemail when we are integrating in with a telephone system. Instead we used a built in voicemail, we used a voicemail in the phone system that’s already native with it.

So, if I wanted to do that for example, I would forward my call again over to that magic voicemail number. Now, that voicemail number will change depending on the phone system. It might not be 500 it might be 5000, it might be 400, it might be something really obscure, so do check with your representative, just to find out what that number actually is. Now, if I was to call that extension, I would go directly into my voicemail and then of course the user would be able to leave a message for me there.

Now, if I wanted to add a new number in, I hit the ‘More settings’, go to ‘Forward’, add a new contact in, and then I could add whatever phone number that I wanted to here, for example. So, I could add our office number in and just hit close on that. Then, you’ll notice that this will then appear here, forwarding all my calls. Now my calls will come straight in and then straight back out to the office number because I’m not available to take those calls in there as well. Okay, so I’m just going to hit ‘Do not forward’.

The other bit is also around the contacts. So, you can see up here we do have contacts, so I’m just going to select one of my colleagues. So we can see that we’ve got one of my colleagues test devices here that I’ve searched through into my contacts. This is actually one of his extensions in the office. So, if I wanted to search because I couldn’t remember what it was, I could search it, and find it. Now, I know that on your contacts, the contacts are actually taken from your outlook. So, any contacts you have in your outlook would also show in your Teams device as well. It is not linked with the phone system, it is something that we need to import, so if you’re having any problems with that, do speak to the people that look after your outlook, whether that’s your IT team or your internal teams, as I’m sure that they can help with adding, and there are ways to mass import contacts as well, which is something that we did. We imported our whole contact list into for example, my outlook, so I’ve got everyone’s number that I can go through and search. Or, if it’s just a one off contact for you, you can always hit ‘Add contact’ and of course you could type your name in here. So I’m just going to type in “Demo video”, and then we’re going to hit add. We can add where they’re calling from, company, title, and then we can add their phone number as well, and then we could hit ‘Add’. So if we then went in and did “Demo Video” now, we can see that is now added in as a contact, and we could utilise that as a contact.

Now the contact if they are found, as you saw when I called in, if it knows what the contact is, it will pop the name. So if I’m calling from my extension again, you’ll see down here that it knows that I am calling from Jacob Main, which is one of my test extensions that I’ve got down here. So it knows that I’m calling from that device, of course I missed that call, you can see that it’s gone straight down as a missed call down there as well.

Now, a feature for the Panasonic, of course we forwarded all our calls to our voicemail, which is great. However, how do we pick up those voicemails? Now, there will be a separate guide sent out to you from your representative for your particular phone system. However, there will also be a web portal, where you can go in and manage those destinations of where you want your voicemails to go.

So I’m just going to log into an example customer here. So, you’ll be given a web address. You might need to go through a security certificate, just to be able to log on to this web address. But if we log onto this, I’m just going to login to this particular user. So, let me just do [type username and password]. And this is me now controlling the extension that is Teams, because Teams is an extension on your phone system. So anything I do, I can actually control from the phone system when I’m in here. Now, there shouldn’t really be much for you to do in here, because we are doing it all in that Teams client. You should probably only need to go in here to set it up.

So, the thing that I want to change is my mail address. So I want to add in here, where do I want to receive my voicemail to? So I’m just going to put in my email address and then I’m going to hit ‘Use for voicemail notification’ and that’s it!

Now, the one key thing here is do not forget to hit ‘Apply’ up here [top right], so we’re going to hit ‘Apply’ to apply that setting. If you’ve got anything else that you need to go through and change here, you can change your login details as well. So if we need to go through and change your login details, you can go through and do it there. There might be some other features that your representative might go through, onto this particular portal. We do tend to only use it for the mail address elements when we’re using it for teams, but there is a lot more that we can do on this – especially with users that do just have extensions on there as well.

So, that concludes this very brief introduction into Teams calling using the Panasonic clients. If you do have any questions or if you do have any support queries, please don’t hesitate to give us a call on our main number, or give our support team an email and we’ll be more than happy to go through anything in fine detail. Please do also note that some of these codes and elements that I have given out through this video will differ to your phone system, so you will need to just double check those digits with your representative as well.

Thanks very much!