5 Ways to Connect Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex in 2021
For many reasons and in many businesses, we regularly see organizations with instances of both Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex.
The Webex Meetings for Microsoft Teams integration and many other integrations that we have been working are creating a cohesive ecosystem with the aim of enhancing our customers’ daily routines. Please visit the Cisco Webex App Hub to learn more about the Cisco Webex Meetings for Microsoft Teams integration. My company is trying to decommission Webex in favor of using Microsoft Teams. Some of our Webex users use their 'personal room' feature in Webex. They then send out a link to their personal room so that recurring or one-off meetings always go to their room. People can just drop-in and the link doesn. Cisco Webex Teams offers native in-app whiteboard with seamless usage on Webex board while in Microsoft Teams, the whiteboard integration is powered by the Whiteboard web app. By and large, users rate Microsoft whiteboard easy to use but found the whiteboard experience more optimized for Surface devices and Windows PCs as compared to iOS.
This post addresses how businesses got to this situation and highlights the best ways to connect the two platforms together.
Why Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex?
Common reasons for instances of both Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex include:
- Legacy or current Cisco hardware like telepresence, VoIP handsets, and Cisco Spark boards
- Microsoft 365 packages offering free Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams licenses
- Mergers and acquisitions where one company uses Cisco Webex and the other uses Microsoft Teams
- A new CIO or IT Manager started and implemented their preferred
solution - You interact with guests from other organizations that use different messaging platforms
Can Microsoft Teams replace Webex?
Microsoft Teams has tons of great features, like grid videos and custom backgrounds. You can integrate your conversations with Microsoft 365 and access direct routing.
But Microsoft Teams isn’t the right solution for everyone.
If you try to shift everyone to Microsoft Teams, you risk isolating some of your team members who use Webex.
People who don’t want to stop using their preferred app won’t switch easily. This puts your team at risk of shadow IT and other security issues.
It’s always better to give your team the freedom to use the tools they prefer.
If you do need to connect the two together, the next section outline five ways to connect the two platforms together.
1- Webex call features in Microsoft Teams
If all you want to do is connect your Microsoft Teams account holders with Cisco Webex calling features, here’s how:
In April 2020, Cisco announced a new Call Appfor Microsoft Teams. The app launches calls through Webex technology, even when you click the call button in Microsoft Teams.
To access this functionality, follow these steps:
- Verify users have accounts activated in the Webex Control Hub
- Ensure users are registered to the Cisco Webex Calling or Unified Communications Manager
- Make sure users have the Webex app
- Ensure you have Administratorprivileges for Microsoft Teams
- Update phone numbers for users in the Azure Active Directory
With us so far? Great.
Head over to the Microsoft Teams Admin Center and click Teams Apps followed by Manage apps. You can search for the Webex Call function and toggle the app status to allowed.
Remember to update your permission policies to allow third-party apps too.
In the Teams apps menu, click on Setup policies and add the Cisco Webex Call app to your Microsoft setup. Users will now be able to click Webex Call at the bottom of a window when chatting in Microsoft Teams.
Or employees can click on the Webex Call function on the left-hand menu bar and just tap in the number of the person they want to call through Webex.
Pros:
- Simple way to connect Webex calling functionality with Microsoft Teams
- Embedded buttons in Teams make the function easy to use
Cons:
- Only works to connect two VoIP calling strategies. You can’t connect your chat messages or file sharing this way.
- Calling opens a new window, which means there are more tabs for users to keep track of.
- Only works to add Webex Calling to Microsoft Teams. You can’t add Microsoft calling to Webex instead.
2 – Cisco Webex and Microsoft 365 integration
Cisco recently announced integration between its Webex app and the Microsoft 365 suite.
How do I integrate Webex with Office 365?
Users can access files like apps like SharePoint and OneDrive from within the Webex app.
If your end goal is to use the Microsoft 365 suite within the Webex app, this integration will work just fine.
How do I integrate a Webex team with Outlook?
Go to your Cisco Webex admin Settings.
Click on Outlook then Outlook settings. You’ll have the option to Connect to Outlook. Choose Yes and hit the Save button.
Having more than one app integrated with Outlook sometimes causes problems with Webex. Before you integrate Webex and Outlook, you’ll have to unregister other tools. This includes removing Skype for Business connections.
Once your Outlook integration is ready, you can see the status of Webex contacts in Outlook.
Pros:
a. Users no longer have to leave their Webex app if they use Microsoft 365 for productivity tools like Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Word.
b. You can benefit from Microsoft Teams governance and data privacy from Microsoft 365 whilst never leaving your Webex app.
c. Share content created in Microsoft apps in Cisco Webex spaces.
Cons:
a. This integration is available for multiple Microsoft apps, but not Microsoft Teams.
b. If you’re a Webex for Web user, you can only view these types of files, but not make
The Cisco Webex and Microsoft 365 integration is great for users that are happy to live in Webex – but it doesn’t take into account users that prefer Microsoft Teams for collaboration.
3 – Bot integration for Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex
If This Then That (IFTTT) helps apps and devices work together.
There are examples of IFTTT working in homes and businesses alike.
When rules are set for one app or device to do something based on the behavior of another app of device, these are called recipes.
From common scenarios like turning up the heating in your home when the temperature drops below a certain threshold to syncing your Instagram and Dropbox account, recipes come in all shapes and sizes.
When setting recipes for both Microsoft and Cisco, this typically includes what happens on Microsoft Teams when a message is posted in Webex.
For this scenario, a Webex users sends a message and the bot in Microsoft Teams gets a notification.
Pros:
a. Bot integrations come with many pre-built recipes to choose from across a range of apps and devices.
b. Familiar look and feel to consumer IFTTT apps.
c. Options to add your own customized recipes.
Cons:
a. Administration time can be lengthy as scenarios have to be set up one-by-one.
b. When new users are added, administrators must build new recipes.
c. Functionality across platforms is limited.
d. Cross platform experience is not seamless. Notifications are received in a bot rather than native to a chat, space or direct message etc.
4 – Host Webex meetings in Microsoft Teams
For users that prefer Microsoft Teams for messaging and collaboration, but must use Cisco Webex for meetings, there is the Cisco Webex Meeting app.
This is perfect for running Cisco Webex meetings direct from Microsoft Teams.
The meeting app is also available for Slack, Workplace from Facebook, and Google Calendar.
Pros:
a. Schedule and join Cisco Webex meetings without leaving Microsoft Teams.
b. Microsoft Teams users just need to add the Webex Meetings app to their Microsoft Teams app.
c. Simple administration in the Cisco Webex Control Hub.
Cons:
a. The Cisco Webex Meetings app for Microsoft Teams doesn’t support accounts on webex.meetings.com, on meetingsln.webex.com, or on Cisco Webex Meetings Server sites.
b. Limited to Cisco Webex Meeting functionality.
c. Messages, chats, files etc cannot be exchanged via the Webex Meeting app for Microsoft Teams. A meeting must be launched to communicate across platform.
d. Jonathan Dame wrote on SearchUnifedCommunications that customers of both Cisco and Microsoft using the integration have labelled it clumsy, forcing them to consider back to working in silos.
5 – External federation for connecting with guests on different platforms
Do you communicate with people outside your organization?
Do they use apps other than Microsoft Teams?
If the answer is yes to both of these questions, according to research, Cisco Webex is one of the most favored.
When this is the case, it becomes extremely unproductive moving out of Teams, into your external contact’s choice of app, and starting the conversation again.
Or even worse, end up resorting to email like it’s the 90s. (Okay, email has a purpose but you get the point).
That’s why Mio has created universal channels for Microsoft Teams with Webex…
You can stay in Teams and send messages to your contractors, suppliers, or clients who use Webex.
They stay in their platform too and Mio translates the messages across platform.
And it’s not just messages that are supported! GIFs, emojis, channels, DMs, and message edits/deletes are all supported.
If this sounds like something you need, install Mio into either Microsoft Teams or Webex.
You choose which platform you use and your external contacts choose theirs.
If you’d like to learn more about enabling cross-platform messaging, you can watch our on-demand webinar with Mio CEO, Tom Hadfield, here.
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The documents my team produces aren’t solo efforts. When I build a presentation, for example, I’ll leave placeholders for colleagues to fill in, ask people to review, and maybe work with a designer. We have great collaboration tools at Cisco with Webex Teams, and with the new approach to bring Webex Teams with you wherever you work, I can use one platform in one place without losing my train of thought…
Cisco IT’s Collaboration strategy is to mirror the Webex Teams approach to building bridges between team collaboration and other solutions for a continuous workflow. With Office 365, we continue with this theme, so you can efficiently collaborate whether you’re out and about on your phone in Webex Teams or writing a document on your laptop in Word. As “Customer Zero” for the Webex Teams and Microsoft Office 365 integration, Cisco IT is trying out different use cases to give customers the benefit of our real-world experience.
We’re introducing the Webex Teams integration into Office 365 to Cisco employees in three phases.
Phase 1 – Email and Calendar Migration
Cisco Webex Meetings Download
We’ve worked on enabling Cisco collaboration in Outlook for years, and this historically has been a challenge in a mixed environment, we have both Macs and PCs and we never seem to get everything working on both – today though, we have all the features on all the platforms integrated with Webex Teams. Click to Call, Click to Chat, and Presence all work in Outlook on Mac and PC and we enabled this as we migrated mailboxes to O365. We’ve also integrated Webex Teams into O365 calendar to get employees to their meetings faster. It’s all part of our continual effort to keep our everyday tools modern, user friendly, and making the collaboration experience seamless – after all, we are a global company and a lot of our teams span multiple time zones.
Phase 2 – Co-authoring and Co-editing
Say I want to edit an Office document that someone added to a Webex Teams space. Before, I’d have to download the document, open it, edit, save, and upload the new version to the space. Did I download the latest version? Not sure. We’ve made life much simpler by integrating Webex Teams with OneDrive and SharePoint Online. Now, I can add an Office document to a Webex Teams space from OneDrive using the file storage and sharing integration in Webex Teams. I have the option to grant editing rights to those who have prior access to my document or to open it up to everyone in the Webex Teams space.
Once the document is uploaded onto OneDrive, no matter where I work, it’s the same document, whether I am in Webex Teams, or using any app in the Office Suite. The experience is seamless – and I don’t even need to re-upload. Co-authoring and editing are a game-changer for us – especially when you can use these tools in our real-time video meetings. Our users are pretty excited about it, and it’s integrated right into Webex Teams. Watch this video to learn more about this experience.
Phase 3 – Social Collaboration
This final step is currently in progress. If I’m in Word editing a colleague’s document, I feel comfortable making little changes like correcting a date. But other changes require some conversation first—for example, “In paragraph 3, you said ‘service’ but I think you meant ‘architecture.’ Right?” So, we wrote an add-in to the Office 365 menu that creates a Webex Teams side panel, allowing you to chat directly from within the document. It’s handy for keeping all conversations about a document in the same place. Plus, the conversation is saved in real time in my Webex Teams, so I can stay in the loop even if I am on the go and don’t have the document open. It’s another win for collaboration, and ultimately user productivity. I’m not sure how many minutes I have spent searching emails for documents, but now I don’t have to, and neither do our employees.
Next up: Adding Collaboration to our Other Cloud Services
In integrating Webex Teams and Office 365, we built what we’re calling the Secure Digital Experience platform. In addition to collaboration, it brings together Duo Security, Advanced Malware Protection (AMP), and our eStore (so that we can make sure we don’t exceed our license count). Once we’ve finished the Office 365 rollout, we plan to connect the platform to other cloud services, including IBM Connections, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.
How did we manage this massive overhaul of tools with minimal user downtime? Migrating 118,000 mailboxes is not easy, but you can learn more about it from my colleagues Kelly Conway and Caroline Te Aika.
The platform has an interesting security angle. Since email contains confidential information, we allow access to Office 365 only from trusted devices. But who wants to wait for a VPN connection every time they check their email away from the office? You can read more about our security considerations here, in a blog by my colleague Dave Jones and myself.
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Questions? Ideas? Please share in the comment box.
Cisco Webex Teams Download