Advanced Communications for Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams has a load of great features that makes it the go-to application for many businesses to host internal and external meetings. However, the meeting joining experience is a little bit – well, boring – compared with the rest of the Teams experience. Not for much longer. The pre-meeting experience is about to get more interesting, and a whole lot more customizable, queue Advanced Communications for Microsoft Teams.
What is Advanced Communications for Microsoft Teams?
In short, it offers customisation and tools to manage your organization’s communication policies.
This means Teams administrators will be able to add a custom logo for display in the lobby, giving an all-important message to guests who join your meetings early. Not only can this feature be used for branding, but to convey any other messages important to your company and culture – such as:
- Opening hours
- Price lists
- Lesson plans
- Learning objectives
- Values
- Agendas
- Current offers and promotions
Microsoft has confirmed that the customization is flexible by each department. So if the HR team would like to display the company’s values to interview candidates but the sales team would like to show live promotions to prospective customers, that’s completely possible.
How Will it be Applied?
The Advanced Communications add-on will be needed to use the branded lobby feature. Advanced Communications is available as an add-on to any paid Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription. Your business will need one Advanced Comms add-on per meeting organizer who wants to brand their lobby – so it isn’t necessary to purchase one for every user.
Along with meeting customization, Advanced Communications will also provide tools to manage your business’s communication policies – it will allow you to monitor, track and analyse data on users and devices. This feature is also in development and will be released at a later date.
Microsoft advises these features won’t be available in any other Microsoft 365 or Office 365 plans, so if you want to take advantage, you’ll need to purchase the add-on.
When Will Advanced Communications be Released?
Microsoft has announced branded lobbies is currently in development with a prospective release in March of this year.
The Advanced Communications add-on is available for free for 60 days – you can find it in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
How Can Blackstar Help?
Blackstar is experienced in deploying Microsoft Teams across a wide range of verticals. Find out how we helped Haseltine Lake Kempner LLP deploy Microsoft Teams here.
We are a Microsoft Partner and are happy to help you with your deployment in any way that suits you – from providing Microsoft licenses, add-ons such as Advance Communications, Session Border Controllers, SIP trunks, project co-ordination, engineers, end-user and admin training, and on-going support and config changes – or any combination thereof.
We stand out from the crowd by consulting with you and offering choice when deploying Microsoft Teams, find out more here.
Contact us for a quote or book a demo on 0333 123 2 123, alternatively, email us on [email protected]
