Microsoft Teams

Genesis solutions for Microsoft Teams provide significantly improved reporting and alerting functionality to Microsoft Teams administrators and users. Our solutions, built on our decades of experience with both on-premises and cloud hosted telephone solutions, have been designed to handle the unique challenges related to alerting on emergency calls as well as capturing events such as calls, meeting and participant details for reporting. Genesis's solutions have been designed from the ground-up to be easy to deploy and scale without requiring on-site resources.

Alerting on Emergency Calls and Other Events

Higher Education organizations nearly all dedicate significant resources to ensuring staff and student safety. Most often, there are specific needs for alerting in the event that 911 is dialed, an evacuation or lockdown is initiated, or panic phones or buttons are activated. Providing immediate access to help in parking lots and other open, public spaces is also an important consideration. There are frequently requirements and policies for responding to emergencies which include alerting on-site responders, providing public-facing notifications and other organization-specific procedures such as completing a checklist or logging important details.

Genesis's solutions have regularly been used by higher education institutions to identify when 911 or other emergency numbers are dialed in real-time, determine location, and provide alerts via overhead paging equipment and desktop-based pop-up alerts. Many of these environments are made up of a combination of Teams and on-site voice solutions, which requires capturing emergencies occurring from multiple sources simultaneously, some of which may be legacy equipment (in the case of many public safety phone solutions).

Genesis's solutions are also used by many of these locations to extend alerts from on-site equipment & Teams to a dedicated smartphone app, which provides not only a real-time alert, but also provide real-time multimedia chat communication, checklists, acknowledgement tracking, emergency responder guidance and other tools specific to the emergency.

Keeping Records of All Calls & Meetings

Using Microsoft Teams for business voice presents both unique benefits and more complex issues due to it not being a typical phone system. Both education institutions and small business have regularly reported issues with basic reporting on call and meeting activity which prevent education users from meeting compliance requirements, and small businesses from determining bonuses or other compensation based on activity. Although this information is collected within Microsoft Teams, there's no easy built-in options for capturing all details in a central location or in an organized manner for creating reports.

Genesis's solutions integrate with Microsoft Teams using a unique process with several APIs to capture every user's call and meeting details. By logging all details in a consolidated location, Genesis's solutions provide these users with both complete, long-term data retention, and extensive reporting options to meet compliance requirements and easily provide reports which can be used to measure activity, calculate bonuses and other performance-based compensation.

Lowering Licensing Costs by Identifying Users & Hardware Which are no Longer in Use

Somewhat unique to cloud UC platforms like Microsoft Teams, pay-per-user licensing requires Education and other large organizations to identify any unused or under-used phones or accounts, and remove them to reduce per-month costs as much as possible. Education institutions often license their Teams based on their previous on-premises system's phone count, which most often leads to over-licensing. There are often numerous phones which aren't actually installed, or phones & DIDs which are associated with users but which are rarely used and do not justify the monthly licensing cost.

Education users run Genesis reports on a regular basis to show the licensing which can be removed due to lack of use. Several Education users report locating from 5 to over 150 unused or under-used licenses in each studied period which they were able to remove, saving them hundreds to thousands per month. In most cases the savings realized by eliminating unnecessary licenses more than offsets the cost of their Genesis solutions, and in at least one case, saved the user over $25,000 annually while also meeting all the previously mentioned reporting and retention requirements as well.