How to get free Audio Conferencing in Microsoft Teams for one year

It’s no secret that COVID-19 has pushed the need for businesses to enable remote working. In-person meetings for many offices are now 100% online. For many companies, these online meetings are essential to communicating with employees while keeping them safe and productive. And for those who either do not have reliable internet access or are just fatigued by constant video conferences, there is a need to join company meetings via a dial-in phone number.

As a Gold-level Microsoft Partner, Amaxra is helping businesses to empower their remote workers with the most options for collaboration—and are offering free Audio Conferencing to Microsoft 365 users for 12 months. Our consultants have deployed numerous remote working solutions over the past few months based on the cloud-powered Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams collaboration app. The advantage of Microsoft Teams for remote work is that an entire organization can use any device to seamlessly create, communicate, and collaborate with internal peers and external partners safely and securely. The Audio Conferencing option, an add-on available to Microsoft 365 E1/E3 plans, enables users to join meetings using a phone line with many dial-in numbers available for major cities around the world.

So, Amaxra will add the new Audio Conferencing capability to all our eligible Microsoft 365 with Teams customers (or any company looking at a Microsoft 365 subscription for their business) for free. The cost is normally $4 per user/per month, but any eligible Amaxra customer with Microsoft 365 subscriptions will pay nothing for the next year. The advantage of enabling Audio Conferencing for Microsoft Teams through Amaxra is that it applies to all net-new Audio Conferencing seats (defined as seats incremental to any existing seats as of August 1, 2020) attached to any Microsoft 365 Business plans. You do not have to be subscribed to the more expensive Microsoft 365 E1/E3 pans to get Audio Conferencing free for one year.

Speaking of more expensive, if your company currently uses Zoom for online conferencing then you are quite aware that you pay around $15 per user/per month for audio conferencing. Amaxra has heard from several businesses that bought into Zoom during the early stages of the global pandemic because they needed an “easy to use” system for online meetings. However, those companies were unaware that Zoom charged significantly more for plans that include online meetings with global phone numbers for dialing into conferences. Some of those same businesses’ IT managers have also complained about Zoom’s lackluster track record when it comes to cyber-security issues with their platform—manifesting in numerous instances of “zoombombing” where Zoom’s ease of use translated to insecure online meetings that were disrupted by vulgar and racist intruders from outside the organization.

Microsoft Teams with Audio Conferencing is objectively more secure than Zoom. Microsoft spends over $1 billion every year on cyber-security research & development to ensure all their apps are hardened against hackers. Most importantly, Microsoft Teams has built-in privacy and security controls that prevent zoombombing by default and unlike Zoom all data send through Teams is encrypted by the Microsoft Cloud infrastructure to ensure data security for your business.

Amaxra encourages any Zoom customers to contact us to learn more about the advantages of using Microsoft Teams for online conferencing and team collaboration at your organization. We also want to help companies with Microsoft 365 to get the free Audio Conferencing add-on enabled for Microsoft Teams before the trial ends on June 30, 2021.