What UCaaS features matter most for remote teams?

In the office, the desk phone was the business line. At home, that job moves to an app. A softphone is a calling app on a computer, and a mobile app does the same job on a phone.

What matters is that the app is part of the company's phone system. It should follow the dial plan, which is the company's map of extensions and routing rules. Then a call to the main number can reach someone at home, and a customer never has to learn anyone's personal number.

Atlantech Online's UCaaS page describes this arrangement. Its phone system runs in Atlantech's cloud, and it says the softphone's calling features are tied directly to the business dial plan. The page lists mobile apps for Android and iOS, and "find me/follow me" calling with simultaneous ring.

The page's price cards show where this feature sits. The softphone is named on the Premium Line card, which starts at $18 per user per month. The Business Line card starts at $12 and lists call handling: forwarding, transfer, hunt groups, park and pickup, and unlimited local and domestic long-distance calling. A team with no desk phones should price the card that names the softphone. For our 15 people, that's $270 a month in per-user charges if the quote comes in at the starting rate. The quote sets the contract term and confirms that the line carries both the softphone and the call handling the team needs.

A mobile app means a person can take business calls on a phone. It doesn't by itself mean a call in progress can move from the laptop to the phone. That's a separate feature, and it matters if your people tend to walk out the door in the middle of a call.

An office lets you see who's around. A remote team needs the software to stand in for that, and it needs a way to pass a customer to the right person.

In our example, a call to the main number goes to a hunt group, which rings several people. Whoever answers then needs transfer to move the caller to the colleague who can help. Presence helps them choose. It's a status beside each name, recorded from activity such as a call in progress or a meeting on the calendar.

On Atlantech's page, hunt groups and transfer appear on the Business Line card. Instant messaging and presence are described as part of the softphone app, with presence updated from a person's phone and calendar status.

A recorded status is different from knowing someone is available. An available status built from phone and calendar activity shows only that there's no call on the business line and nothing on the calendar. It can't show that someone has stepped away from the desk. A quick message from the same app before a transfer lowers the odds that the customer lands in voicemail.

Meetings and screen sharing belong in this group too, with one condition. The Premium Line card lists conferencing and collaboration, and the page describes video meetings and desktop and file sharing. If the team already holds its meetings in a tool it plans to keep, these add little, and calling should carry the decision. We describe how the pieces fit in the core components of a UCaaS platform.

In a remote company, the business line lives on devices spread across people's homes. When someone leaves, their extension has to stop ringing on their phone, and their customers have to reach someone else.

Because those devices are dispersed, the administrator has to do this work remotely. From a browser, the administrator should be able to remove a user, move their number to a colleague and change where the main number rings. None of that should require touching the departing person's laptop.

Single sign-on helps with one part of this. It lets people sign in to the phone app with their company account, so where single sign-on is the only way into the app, disabling that account stops new sign-ins. An app that's already signed in can keep working until its session ends or the phone account itself is removed.

Creating and removing phone accounts is a separate function, usually called provisioning. A company with frequent hires and departures should find out whether a platform automates it. Without that, removing the phone account is a manual step on every departure. Our answer on UCaaS security practices covers the wider set of controls.

An office phone can be registered to the office address. A laptop used at home needs a correct location of its own. In the US, a 911 call uses that location to send help to the right place, as we explain in what Enhanced 911 is.

Microsoft Teams shows how much this varies inside one product. Microsoft's page on emergency addresses for remote locations covers US 911 calls. It says Teams can use the operating system's location services to suggest an address. The user can confirm it, edit it or type a new one. Teams saves the confirmed address for that network and clears saved addresses when the user signs out.

The same page says this experience is for Teams desktop on Windows and Mac. Teams mobile supports automatic location detection but not a user-entered address. Teams phones don't support the work-from-home experience at all, and device privacy settings can conflict with automatic detection.

How the address was set changes how the call is handled. Microsoft's routing table applies in the United States to Calling Plan users, Operator Connect partners and Direct Routing with a certified emergency calling provider. In that table, an address the operating system suggested and the user confirmed sends the call directly to the public safety answering point. So does an address the user picks or edits through Teams' address suggestions and confirms. A suggested address the user hasn't confirmed is screened, which means a screening center checks it for accuracy before the call is transferred. An address entered by hand without a suggested match is screened too, even after the user confirms it.

For our 15 people, the laptop app and the mobile app can behave differently on the same platform. The feature to look for is location handling on each kind of device the team uses. We cover the practical steps in how to register a VoIP phone for 911, and the wider rollout in how to set up UCaaS for a remote team.

Fifteen homes are fifteen networks, and the company manages none of them. No calling feature fixes a weak WiFi signal. What a platform can do is show support what happened on a call.

Microsoft's network guidance for Teams explains why homes are hard. It says WiFi networks aren't necessarily designed or configured for real-time media. It also recommends that Teams traffic bypass a company VPN, an arrangement called split tunneling. A VPN adds a second layer of encryption to media that's already encrypted, and it can send traffic to a more distant entry point, which adds delay.

Teams audio needs little bandwidth. Microsoft recommends 58 kbps in each direction per device. Throughput is worth checking, but a download and upload figure doesn't show packet loss or jitter, and the same page names those as possible causes of static and robotic voices. Video needs far more bandwidth, which we size in UCaaS bandwidth requirements.

That leaves diagnosis. Microsoft says the Teams admin center can investigate call problems for an individual user, while its Call Quality Dashboard shows patterns across the organization. Records for one person's calls are what a remote team wants from any platform, because each person is on a different network. Atlantech's page advertises 24/7 customer support, which is where a home worker's trouble report would go on that service.

When one person's calls sound bad, the common call quality problems each have more than one plausible cause, so the report matters. Give support the time of the call, the device, and whether the VPN was on. That gives them a specific call to look up.