I personally have not used Microsoft Teams as a phone system. My employers have stuck completely with Internet-based communications, mostly to others in the same organization. But if you want to integrate your organization’s phone system into Teams and have your phone calls ring through in Teams, that’s absolutely possible.

Here’s an introduction on some of the things to consider:

What if you need to partition your organization so that some members of your tenant cannot communicate with others in Teams? For example, maybe you have interns who you do want to have Teams access but not to any sensitive information.

Information barriers are the solution you need. You can block interaction across the barriers so that the interns cannot see any content from anybody else or vice versa.

Microsoft Teams is not just for users in your organization. You can also use it to collaborate with people from other organizations or no organization at all. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

If you’re going to deploy Microsoft Teams in your business network, you’ll need to confirm first that your network can handle it. That means fast enough bandwidth speeds to handle everything you want all of your employees to be able to do, as well as having all the ports open for the necessary traffic to get through. If you’re going to need hundreds of users on the same network sharing their screens alongside their video and audio in meetings of 50 people, that will eat up a lot of network resources.

Microsoft has offered a few tools to help with this preparation.

Suppose you want to lock the sidebar in Teams for some users to ensure that they don’t have different experiences, which can help with providing support and documentation as well as make sure nobody accidentally loses their easy access to the app they want to use. But you don’t want to lock all users; there are some like your IT department that might need some freedom to use their Teams differently.

This can be done with an app setup policy in the Microsoft Teams admin centre.