HSC Faculty and Staff Message
Greetings, HSC Team:
The University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth is replacing the existing Avaya/Nortel phone system with Microsoft Teams in the coming year. This project is part of a larger plan to migrate to Microsoft Teams over the entire UNT World including HSC, UNT Denton, UNT Dallas, UNT Frisco, and UNT System Office in Dallas.
The Integrated Communications Platform (ICP) modernizes telephone communications and collaboration, reducing complexity and cost. After the migration, you will be able to receive and place calls from your computer or mobile devices using Microsoft Teams
Currently, the HSC telephone service is being migrated to Microsoft Teams. A pilot group of about 80 users migrated their numbers to Teams earlier this month.
The remaining phone numbers on the HSC campus will migrate to Teams during the January to March timeframe. We will perform these moves over a series of different time frames. The dates for those moves will be determined soon.
We also want to mention that until all numbers have been migrated to Teams, there will be potential calling scenarios over two separate phone systems. Some users will be using Teams and some users will be on the existing phone system.
As we move forward, and users may not know who is on what system, we recommend that for internal calls you try dialing four digits at first. If your call does not go through, try again by dialing 10 digits. As long as you are calling people and not numbers, you can reach users on Teams inside the organization by simply searching a name and calling them this way.
What is Teams?
Teams is a unified communications platform that brings telephony, video conference and chat features under a single software platform. The campus is already using the video conference and chat features of the software. We are adding the telephony/phone capability.
Mobility is one of the biggest benefits of the new Teams solution. Team members can now “take” their numbers with them.
Faculty/staff will keep their current numbers through the transition. If your department requested a standard phone to replace the current one, you will get a Teams ready phone. The same process pertains to headsets.
Phone lines on analog service will not be moving to Teams. Teams does not have a solution for analog service, so we will keep these lines on our existing phone system until a suitable solution is found for our analog footprint. Most analog phone lines are used for things like faxes, modems, elevator phones and emergency phones.
Benefits of the new system include:
• Anytime, any device, anywhere access
• Integration with the Microsoft Teams and Office 365 platform
• Dial-in conferencing for up to 350 participants
Moving forward
To install Microsoft Teams on your personal device, download it from https://teams.microsoft.com/download.
If you work offsite, please use the Microsoft Teams application that is installed on the computer you use offsite for best experience.
More information regarding Microsoft Teams can be found online at: https://icp.untsystem.edu.
We recently sent out a list of each departments phone numbers to each department contact in an effort to gather information about all of our phone lines. HSC Telecom will be evaluating each department’s setup and will reach out to those departments with a solution for each unique setup in Teams.
As we move forward, we will send out more communications about the project timeline.
For questions about this project, please visit ICP.untsystem.edu or contact your HSC Telecom Team at telecom@unthsc.edu.
Sincerely,
UNTHSC ITS Telecom