Microsoft Teams updates - Summer 2022
During the summer Microsoft shared a long list of new and updated features for Teams to improve customers' day-to-day working experience. We understand it isn’t so easy for people to keep up with Microsoft news every month, especially during the holiday period. That’s why we have collected, as we usually do, a list of the most relevant Teams updates:
- LinkedIn integration - From the Teams chat, channels, calls, and meetings, you can now have direct access to the LinkedIn profile. Just one click to connect and read the current role or past experience of the contact.
- Recording notifications in your default language - Microsoft cares about compliance regulations and added to Teams the possibility of hearing the call recording notifications in different languages. In this scenario, the announcement is played in the same language simultaneously for both parties.
- View shared content in a pop-up window - During calls and meetings, the shared content can be now seen in a separate window just by clicking the “Pop-out” button in the settings menu. This option allows participants to reduce their distractions by focusing their attention only on the content.
- Collaborative annotation on shared content - Presenters can now enable all the participants to collaborate on the shared presentation with their annotations, which are saved with the meeting registration. This option allows to involve the attendees during the meetings and improves the Teams experience.
- Choose file download destination - Sometimes it is useful to choose where the documents are saved after the download. Now when users of Windows and Mac devices download a file, can select the preferred folder to store it.
- Digital Code to join meetings - If you would like to avoid external people from entering the meeting, now you can share with your attendees the ID and the passcode of the virtual event to join it. This information can be seen also in the calendar reminder.
- New Microsoft Form experience in Teams - Microsoft has enhanced how users add polls to chats and meetings. A new app, named “Polls”, is now available to let people create their new surveys and ratings or re-use the past ones. The user experience is increased also with the new poll animation: a dynamic confirmation message and a new poll result view with different colors.
Are you excited to try these new features?
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Mida Fax Server: 6 attractive reasons to choose the new version
A completely new version of Fax Server is now available in the Mida portfolio: Mida has just renewed its turnkey fax management solution by adding new professional features to better address the needs of this business-critical application. The solution was optimized to guarantee a high level of reliability and security to manage incoming and outcoming documents with centralized storage and save costs.
What to expect from Mida Fax Server
Mida Fax Server enables customers to complement their existing IP technology with proven and tested FoIP functionality in their networks.
The new professional application can be adopted by any organization and structure that can benefit of:
- High Availability (HA) and Redundancy – Important improvements in performance and reliability has been made to make the solution more suitable for distributed environments. A new HA architecture is now available: the number of required Virtual Machines is reduced from 4 to 2, which ensures service continuity. This new scenario decreases the maintenance costs.
- Fast deployment and easy maintenance – The new Virtual Machines can be installed and set up in a few minutes and they are designed to host other UC Mida components. All the system parameters can be configured and administered from a dedicated page, where the administrators can also:
- define multiple virtual fax boxes, each one with a dedicated phone number;
- assign multiple users to a given fax box with different permission levels;
- Centralized new communications management UI – Agents can benefit from a renewed useful and intuitive user interface and a smooth flow to efficiently send and schedule faxes, easy receive digital documents, and quickly search them directly in the same web portal;
- Multi-tenant solution – Multi-tenancy modules can be installed to serve different companies by the same application server;
- Optimizations – Companies can rely on more sophisticated integration processes with external systems (e.g. email) with distributed notification system; an advanced backup and archiving system with multi-destination support and the possibility to scale from 2 to 120 simultaneous fax channels per server.
- Increased security and quality assurance – The new secure kernel, which runs on 64 bits machines, and the Dialogic stack ensure a top-quality user-unlimited solution. Incoming and outgoing faxes can be managed by agents from any device with a secure plug-and-play solution.
Want to know more about the new Fax Server to evaluate its adoption for your company?
Fill out this form to get in contact with our experts, they will come back to you in a flash.
5 pros of choosing a connected contact center for Microsoft Teams
We have widely heard about Microsoft Teams Direct Routing as a method to rapidly move UC into one of the most popular communication and collaboration hubs, Microsoft Teams, but this topic hides several aspects that may not yet be completely clear. That is why this article aims to collect the main advantages of this approach.
First of all, let’s analyze the scenario.
In the last two years, IT Managers have experienced the huge potential of gathering all the tools needed by employees into a single cloud hub, such as Microsoft Teams. They have started considering Direct Routing as an easy and secure way to transform this platform into their new PBX as, and we will see it in detail below, this method of connecting a 3rd party contact center to the PSTN and Teams phone system, includes several advantages.
From the architecture point of view, just an SBC certified for direct routing in Microsoft Teams and a SIP Trunk are required. to manage conversations within Teams with a connected contact center regardless of the place agents are working. This is a strategic method to face the current hybrid work scenario: it streamlines the operators’ activity and allows them to increase their daily productivity. Companies can personalize the platform by activating only the applications they really need.
Why should you choose a connected contact center for Teams?
With the Direct Routing approach, companies can benefit from a series of important advantages:
- Microsoft-certified UC solution - Many of the most professional contact center solutions for Teams are included in the Microsoft Teams connected contact center certification program. This award ensures the high standards, compatibility, and reliability that customers can expect from Microsoft products: the integration between these solutions and Teams is certified by a series of technical and security requirements verified by Microsoft itself.
- Flexibility and scalability - The connected approach allows companies to:
- maintain the current service provider or choose a new one;
- easily port all the old numbers in Teams and leverage the existing infrastructure;
- host the solution on the preferred storage (e.g. their own cloud storage or the carrier’s one);
- rely on the external technical support of the UC vendor.
- No additional licenses - A connected contact center for Teams allows companies to manage internal and external conversations, served by an agent, to any Teams users, regardless of the type of Teams licence the recipient has. This allows Microsoft E5 or Phone System licences to be purchased only for employees who are to be configured as call center operators, and not for all users.
- All-in-one platform - Adopting a contact center integrated with Microsoft Teams is a strategic decision for companies, as some vendors offer a wide range of functions/integrations that should not be underestimated:
- Dynamics, Salesforce and PowerBI integration;
- complementary UC features, like compliance recording;
- integration with VoIP communication technologies (e.g. Cisco, Avaya).
Relying on a single UC platform decreases the time employees spend jumping from one application to another, as well as the time supervisors dedicate to analyse UC within the company.
- Advanced professional UC functionalities and reports - A connected contact center enables companies to take advantage of additional sophisticated call routing algorithms, more flexible IVRs and enhanced and customizable queue management solutions to provide a top-quality communication service within Teams.In addition, this type of solution allows a coordinated analysis of all data relating to company communications, agent performances and related KPIs.
If you want to read further resources about connected contact center for Microsoft Teams, you can have a look at these couple of articles by UCtoday.com:
- Top 7 Reasons Microsoft Teams Direct Routing is so Popular
- Direct Routing Powers Connect Call Centre Integration
While if you are interested in talking to an expert and discovering C3 Cloud Contact Centre, our connected contact center solution for Teams, contact us now by filling in this form.
Mida Recorder: the multi-source voice recording system for transportation
Will you be attending InnoTrans, the international fair for transportation and mobility technologies, that will take place in Berlin this September?
Whether you plan to participate or not, if you work in the transport market and you’re interested in knowing more about multi-media recording systems, here’s a preview of the solutions we have developed for mission-critical environments, which we will be showcasing in Berlin.
Mida Universal Recording System platform is a professional recorder that supports all relevant communication technologies involved in the railway, metro, and public transport markets. It is designed to face the challenges of such environments, where communications can get critical. That’s why we’ve developed a unified recording platform, with centralized recording and a single point of management for all communications sub-systems, plus a secure and encrypted repository and a search and play console, accessible from any device.
What to expect from Mida Recorder
This trusted recording application ensures:
- Compliance - The solution is compliant with the latest regulatory requirements concerning recording policies (GDPR, MiFID II);
- High Availability - The duplication of the system components grants service continuity;
- Multi-source recording - The application records public announcements, telephone conversations managed by PBX, GSM-R, and Tetra Radio conversations, and communications handled by Dispatcher systems;
- Unique recording management - The system provides a single view of all the recorded communications. In the same application, accessible from any device, recordings can be compared, retrieved, and stored (if needed external storage units can be added);
- Reliability - The recordings are securely and smartly stored in the system thanks to file anti-tampering, file encryption, and file compression;
- Advanced scenario reconstruction - The sophisticated search and time selection filters make it easy to reconstruct any scenario, even in the event of an accident;
- Centralized or distributed architectures - The modular and flexible approach and the full scalability of the solution meet the requirements of resilience and redundancy typical of transport project;
Intuitive User Interface
Mida recording system provides a useful web-based user interface, called Playback Station, which allows customers to instantly search, play and download recorded conversations. Call tags and call data facilitate search. When communications handle critical processes, an intuitive and simple-to-use UI can significantly reduce search times.
+18 years of recording experience
Since 2004, Mida provides professional telecommunications solutions for the transport sector assuring the best-in-class service quality and the highest level of reliability to drive technology evolution. With a team of qualified engineers, experts, and international partners, Mida can totally address the recording needs of the transportation sector: Mida's main projects in railways, metro, and public transportations are in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Would you like to go deeper into our recording system for the transport industry? You can either join us at InnoTrans 2022, 20th-23rd September, or contact us through this form!
New Mida Attendant Console for visually impaired and blind agents
Last year we presented the long-standing partnership with Vision Dept, an Italian distributor of products and services for visually impaired and blind people. We’ve been working closely to this partner to understand how we could improve Mida Attendant Console in order to allow them to smoothly use the application, without any kind of limitation compared to sighted operators.
Now we are proud to announce that also the brand-new UI of Mida Attendant Console makes good on this mission: despite the total graphic makeover, we maintained the same key dedicated elements included in the previous release thus enhancing its usability with new practical implementations.
The features added in this new release help visually impaired and blind agents simplify their call management activities and make them feel more integrated into the customer service staff. Their disabilities are not a barrier or limitation: their activities are supported by a professional UC application, which they can customize to their liking to be more efficient in their daily work activities.
How does Mida Attendant Console help these agents?
The special needs of each visually impaired and blind operator can be efficiently met with the following features:
- Optimized shortcuts - The new shortcuts can be easily modified by agents by selecting favorite keys from the drop-down menu available in the console. These shortcuts help agents to search in a second for the information they need (e.g. contact details) just by using the keyboard;
- Moving with the keyboard from one area to another - Agents can move from one area of the console to another using only the tab key and then move around these areas using only the up and down keys to better handle calls;
- New audio notifications - Before receiving new incoming calls or before notification of reminders, the console beeps to inform users of these two important actions;
- Automatic login and logout from all the queues - When agents log in or out of the console, this functionality allows them to log in and out of all assigned queues without operating on each one individually;
- Essential elements shown - We know that each person with a sight disability has different needs - that’s why we allow them to customize the console by simplifying the user interface: they can choose which information or areas they want to be displayed by default;
- Customizable console appearance - Operators with visual disabilities can improve the usability of the console by customizing certain key aspects, such as increasing the font size and contrasts of the main areas, choosing colors, and enabling the all caps text option. Changing these elements is important to optimize the efficiency of screen magnifiers.
All these functionalities can be set up directly by the agent from the setting area of Mida Attendant Console or in Mida Unified Portal, the web portal where Mida products can be configured.
Curious to know more about how Mida Attendant Console can support your visually impaired and blind operators? Write us a mail at marketing@midasolutions.com.
Mida is now an ISO 27001 certified company
Mida is proud to officially announce the ISO 27001 certification, recently issued by DNV GL, one of the leading global auditors which has helped enterprises in more than 100 countries, since 1864, to increase the security and the sustainability of their business activities.
Concomitantly with ISO 27001, we renewed also ISO 9001 certification, which confirms the quality of our managing processes.
ISO 27001 in a nutshell
ISO 27001 is the international standard that dictates the standards and requirements to be met to implement an ISMS, Information Security Management System. According to the ISO 27001 international guidelines and best practices, companies must implement a framework of processes, policies, procedures, and technologies in order to securely handle and monitor information and cope efficiently with potential risks.
Why ISO 27001 is a must-have
During the certification process, an external auditor performs a series of legal, technical and physical checks on all areas of the company (digital and physical documentation, hardware and software, and personnel skills). This comprehensive audit assesses whether it is necessary to increase data protection on all company assets. All internal and external risks, cyber and non-IT, are assessed according to the current ISO 27001 requirements to obtain a comprehensive and central view of corporate security.
This certification process mainly helps to:
- identify security vulnerabilities and threats that companies need to be aware of;
- increase resistance to technological and non-technological attacks and understand how to respond to the most common threats;
- provide a central and unified management structure for information security to improve protection.
Mida ISO 27001 certification
The ISO 27001 certification is a great achievement for us, as we have always dedicated great attention to the protection of information. This certification proves that in all our processes, information is always protected the data categorized as confidential is only accessible to a limited number of stakeholders: only authorized Mida employees have access to this information and technical protection process against computer fraud is in place.
During the certification process, no non-conformities were detected and DNV GL stated that no follow-up audits were necessary. The audits highlighted Mida's strengths in this area:
- high awareness of the employees interviewed on data protection issues;
- use of tools for analysing the vulnerability of systems to avoid risks;
- willingness to increasingly integrate data management systems.
Check Mida’s ISO27001 Policy or talk to us if you want to have more details on how we are committed to protect the security of our information and those of our customers.
Mida on the track to InnoTrans 2022
After two postponed editions due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, finally, the most important international trade fair for transport and mobility technologies is approaching. InnoTrans is a global landmark event for those who work in these sectors: it is a unique opportunity to both network and keep up to date with industry news.
SAVE THE DATE: September, 20th - 23rd, International Congress Center ICC Berlin from 09:00 am to 6:00 pm.
What to expect from the event
InnoTrans has finally reached its 13th edition and will gather together the global community of transportation and mobility professionals. This prominent event, organized by Messe Belin, takes place every two years and covers the entire 200k square meters of the fairground of Berlin.
Running since the late 90s, this international fair has been welcoming an increasingly worldwide audience of experts, decision-makers, associations, opinion leaders, institutions, and all-size companies determined to leverage the show as a stage to discuss together new technologies and innovations in the transportation market.
The main aim of this edition is to improve transport efficiency by winking at sustainability: InnoTrans 2022 will focus on the future of mobility based on eco-friendly technologies to cope with the current climate change.
This year, the event will be sub-divided into five trade fair segments, spanning over 42 halls:
- Railway Technologies
- Railway Infrastructures
- Public Transport
- Interiors
- Tunnel Constructions
Materials, components, systems, products, and complete vehicles will be showcased to the 160.000 international attendees expected at InnoTrans 2022. In 2018 the audience came from 149 countries and there were 3.062 exhibitors from 61 countries. Big numbers that keep increasing year by year!
What to expect from Mida at InnoTrans
Our experts will present to attendees our best-selling recording solutions for the transportation environment, Mida Voice and Video Recorder.
Mida has been providing telecommunications solutions for the transportation industry for 18 years, developing software products such as professional recording, logging systems, and voice-over IP services. This voice recording system supports all relevant communication technologies involved in this critical sector.
Our reliable product has been chosen for imposing railway and transportation projects in Europe, North Africa, and Middle East. Among the reasons why it was preferred to the competition, its modular approach is the most prominent one, as it can address the requirements of different scenarios. Mida Voice Recording System ensures:
- scenario reconstruction;
- service continuity;
- centralized or distributed architectures;
- all traceability requirements;
- unified view of all communications collected from different sources;
- secure communication repository;
- search and play console ”Mida Playback Station” accessible from any device.
Get your ticket here to join our team there and talk with our experts about Mida trusted voice recording system. Stop by our booth #520, hall 4.1 to find out the main technologies supported, the key integrations, the most relevant features, and the highlights of the product.
Brand new look & feel for Mida Supervisor Console
As our customers and partners know, our mission is to provide value-added innovative technologies that can have a decisive impact on enterprises' communications.
This is more than a matter of new features, new integrations with third-party applications, or higher security levels achieved- which are all undoubtedly integral parts of any software product research and development process. The User Experience and the graphical appearance of the application are just as important.
As anticipated in this article, we have already started the process of renewing our applications providing them with a brand new user interface, more intuitive and attractive than the previous one. This project touches the entire Mida portfolio, as we wanted to ensure graphical continuity between the different applications, to allow the end-user to rapidly take advantage of the new interfaces, and quickly become familiar with them.
Mida's philosophy behind this entire renewal process is to make available at agents’ fingertips what they really need, removing from the UI complexities and unnecessary information. Gathering too much information on the same page can make agents’ daily activities less efficient, that’s why we would like to limit it to the minimum. A smooth user experience can make a difference in the business growth processes because it positively influences the increase of agents’ performances and- consequently- the quality of the service provided.
After having renewed the User Interface of Mida Attendant Console and Mida Recorder, the time has come for Mida Supervisor Console: Mida's technical team has worked hard to translate the advanced features of this UC application into the new easy-to-use layout.
Its new appearance allows supervisors to monitor operators’ KPIs in a fast and intuitive way. The application main page is now organized into three main areas:
- on the left, the navigation menu allows moving between the various sections of the console;
- in the middle, the dashboard of the selected tab shows the main indicators associated with it;
- on the top right corner, the settings menu allows supervisors to navigate to the application settings page or log out from the system.
With this new extremely intuitive UI, this console is the perfect application for all those requiring a turnkey and ready-to-use solution to monitor all the contact center and agents’ activities. Keeping these KPIs constantly monitored, empowers companies with actionable analytics, essential to improve the efficiency of their services:
- Mida Supervisor Console shows real-time data and some charts showing data measured on average over a period of time, which can be defined from the system settings.
- It allows the supervisor to take direct action on the contact center operations: including, for example, forcing agents login and logout, changing in-service and out-of-service call treatment etc.
To go deeper into the new look and feel of Mida Supervisor Console and discover how this UC solution helps companies to improve their service, get in touch with us here.
Mida Compliance Recorder in MS Teams Certification Program
Mida Compliance Recorder for Microsoft Teams has officially entered in the Compliance Recording for Teams Certification Program- this extra product certification comes as a confirmation of the product reliability in terms of quality, compatibility and security.
Mida Compliance Recorder for Microsoft Teams is the cloud recording solution that helps you to capture, safely archive and quickly retrieve all your business conversations.
Mida Compliance Recorder is designed specifically for Microsoft Teams as it is based on Microsoft Graph APIs. The solution allows organizations to capture any conversation transiting in the organization’s Teams client. Either it comes from a Teams user or from an external PSTN number.
Its flexible structure allows organizations to decide where to host the application: possibilities include on-Premises, hybrid and (public or private) cloud deployment models (including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud).
Configuration variables allow you to define recording policies, which can be assigned according to users (selective recording), or on a total-recording basis. Moreover, users can be assigned different privileges, allowing supervisors to decide information access criteria: standard users normally will access just to their records, while team leaders will access also to their teams’ recorded conversations.
In extremely regulated verticals, such as critical communications or financial services, compliance regulations often require specific procedures and precautions, like the recording, storage and compliant surveillance of voice and communications. Therefore organizations often find it challenging to use Microsoft Teams for their business recordings as it may not cover all the requirements properly.
Mida Compliance Recoder relies on a web-based platform, called Playback station, which acts as a dashboard for recording analysis, listening and comparison. Recordings retrieval is made super easy allowing users to search for files using user-defined tags but also additional searching parameters based on advanced call metadata (e.g. Date, Time, telephone extension or number etc.).
The protection of recordings is guaranteed by an anti-tampering signature which prevents them from unwanted attempts of alteration or corruption.
Mida Compliance Recorder is designed to guarantee enterprises with easy-to-prove adherence to advanced compliance regulations such as GDPR, MiFIDII and PCI. Automated recording, controlled by policies set up for user or user group allows enterprises to be compliant with the recording, retention and deletion procedures they must be compliant with.
The solution is the easy, reliable and compliant platform for enterprises willing to move corporate recordings to the cloud. Mida Solutions can provide support both for cloud-to-cloud and on-Prem to cloud transitions.
Do you want to get in touch with us to define your transition plan to Teams? Just contact us via this form and we’ll get back to you in a flash!
UCaaS: more than just a license model
In recent years, new communication and collaboration platforms have become popular, and new licensing models have emerged to allow companies to purchase software applications in their preferred mode. Let’s analyze together the current scenario.
To understand the massive success of Unified Communications as a Service, we should take a step backward, to piece together the most significant changes that happened within the UC market in the last couple of years.
Since 2020, having their entire workforce working remotely, companies faced a breaking point with the past: this unexpected change in working habits has highlighted that the previous communication and collaboration solutions weren’t appropriate for the remote and the hybrid work reality. To continue carrying out their daily activities efficiently, employees needed applications integrated into a unique hub, accessible from different devices and not bound to the “old” enterprise UC infrastructure.
Decision Makers and IT Managers were suddenly forced to face this new working reality that, in a short time, turned out to be a real breakthrough. They started to take into consideration cloud-based UC platforms, like Microsoft Teams and Zoom. These two platforms, created for communication and collaboration purposes, then evolved into more complex and complete ecosystems integrated with many third-party software applications, to allow employees to gain access again to the software they needed.
Being both Teams and Zoom purchased as Software as a Service after the Pandemic, SaaS started to be perceived as “the option” for businesses to access cloud-based applications. It goes without saying that when scouting for UC applications to add on top of these platforms, businesses were encouraged to maintain the same approach.
What is UCaaS?
The Unified Communications as a Service is a licensing model that allows companies to activate subscription-based Unified Communication services, paying a fixed monthly or annual fee for using the software. UCaaS infrastructure lets businesses personalize their modern workplace by choosing between telephony and voice, video and audio conferencing, and real-time messaging solutions.
What are the main advantages?
The benefits for businesses are many. Here we have summarized the most relevant ones:
- Easy transition to a cloud-based UC platform - UCaaS supports companies in moving their voice communications to the Cloud allowing them easily to integrate the new UC system within their cloud communications platform, be it Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Setting up the new UC system will be very very fast, and also adding new products or features at a later date will be really easy.
- Flexibility, scalability, and affordability - UCaaS ensures a flexible, scalable, and cost-saving approach to let companies make the most from their UC because:
- Firstly, with its monthly or annual operating cost, UCaaS allows companies to rapidly increase or decrease the number of licenses or add/remove UC applications as needed, avoiding cost/service inefficiencies. This scalability, for example, will not be possible buying perpetual licenses, due to the higher activation costs.
- Secondly, some solution providers allow companies to decide whether they want the services to be hosted in the company cloud, or in the solution provider’s cloud. This is an attractive alternative for companies that do not want UC applications to be hosted in a cloud space managed by a third party. This may be for several reasons, including security or accounting reasons, or internal policy regulations. Buying UCaaS hosted in the company cloud may be considered “the cloud evolution” of the old on-Premises, while retaining all the advantages of the pay-per-use approach.
- Less technical expertise required - With the UCaaS, companies can focus their efforts on their core business because this licensing model offloads software safety, updates, and maintenance to the solution provider. This means that the company’s IT staff has fewer technical aspects to take care of. This approach is a good alternative for companies that do not have an internal IT team or do not want them to be responsible for the new UC system setup, implementation, and maintenance.
For all these reasons, activating UC solutions as a service for Microsoft Teams and Zoom environments can be very beneficial for companies purchasing new cloud contact centers or recording applications. Do not hesitate to contact us to talk with our experts about how to implement UCaaS within your business.