The Best Business VoIP Phone Systems: Outlook Calendar Integration

One of your colleagues (at your company), notices your “user status” (on your hosted phone system’s soft phone application), shows “available.” (with a little green dot next to it).

So, they try to instant message you… but there is no response.

You aren’t responding because you’re in your weekly meeting with your boss. The meeting is on your Outlook calendar… but your soft phone isn’t syncing with your calendar.

Nobody has time to manually update their status, so eventually (after months of this happening), your colleagues start to ignore a person’s “status,” since it’s usually inaccurate. So, the “status” becomes useless.

Why does it have to be this way? Didn’t your phone system vendor say their solution had Office 365 integration?

How can you avoid this situation?

Watch this video!

Need a recommendation on which hosted PBX vendors offer Outlook Calendar integration? Click the button and ask Mike.

Ask Mike

About the Host
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript:

So, your company is looking into a hosted VoIP phone system for your business, and your company also uses Microsoft Office 365.

One thing I really wanted to point out, it’s a very big thing to notice, a lot of providers offer Microsoft Office 365 integration, but they offer it on different levels. So don’t assume that just because a service provider says they integrate with Office 365 that that’s all the same with every service provider.

One thing in particular that’s important to note is that if you’re going to use your hosted VoIP service provider’s soft phone application, and you want the status of your users to automatically update based on your Outlook Calendar, you want to make sure you ask that question specifically, because a lot of hosted VoIP service providers do not offer that.

So they’ll say they offer Office 365 integration, but that’s kind of a, “gotcha,” that once you install it, you’ll realize that your user statuses aren’t updating, based on their Outlook Calendar… and so your status of your users is basically inaccurate all the time. And your users will just start to ignore the status and it will become useless.

So, if you want your user status to update automatically, based on your user’s Outlook Calendar, make sure you ask that question specifically to the hosted VoIP service providers that you’re talking to.

I hope that helped a little bit. If you have any questions or if you’d like some recommendations on the best hosted VoIP service providers for your company (that will actually do an automatic Outlook Calendar integration with their presence app or their soft phone), let me know. I’d be happy to listen to what your requirements are, and give you some good recommendations. 877-465-3505 [email protected].

Have a great day.