Over the spring and summer, MacEwan ITS staff will migrate employees from the current Avaya phone system to the Microsoft Teams phone system.

This is part of the changes to the Microsoft 365 licensing model that introduced new features and services such as Power BI and Microsoft Defender as MacEwan’s antivirus solution. Most of these services have now been made available to MacEwan faculty and staff, with the remaining licensing to be provisioned by the end of summer 2021.

Employees already use Teams for video meetings and chat and will now be able to use Teams to make internal and external phone calls on their workstation, eliminating the need to have a desk phone. Existing Avaya desk phones and the Avaya Workplace softphone application will be phased out during the migration activities.

Changing from our existing phone system to a cloud-connected phone system requires extensive network changes. MacEwan ITS and Bell, our equipment vendor, installed and configured the new hardware in April. In May, ITS will test voice calls to ensure incoming and outgoing call quality via the Teams client to ensure compatibility with the Microsoft Teams platform before the project team migrates configurations to the production network.

The migration to the Teams phone system will occur in phases starting the first week of June. The first phase will include “early adopters” in a few select areas. The project group will reach out to these groups directly with details of the change. After the early adopters phase is complete, the remaining faculty and staff migration will take place between mid-June and mid-August.

Get a preview of the Microsoft Teams phone system. More information about the migration will be released in the coming weeks. For more information, contact microsoft365@macewan.ca.

From Information Technology Services