RALEIGH – Attempting to cash in on the explosive growth of Microsoft’s collaboration suite Teams, Raleigh-based Bandwidth is rolling out a new app it says “brings texting to Teams.”

Teams use is still soaring even as other collaboration tools such as Zoom have suffered in the improving COVID climate with more people returning to offices. According to the Business of Apps “Microsoft Teams reached 270 million users in 2022, up from 145 million it reported in 2021 · From March to June 2020, Microsoft Teams noticed 894% growth.”

  • MORE COVERAGE: To learn more about Bandwidth’s Send-To app read here.

Raleigh-based Bandwidth on Thursday announced its “Send-To” messaging app designed for Teams.

“Send-To enables enterprise users to send SMS texts from within Teams instead of having to use their personal phones, enabling faster and more efficient work collaboration,” the company says. “The new app expands Bandwidth’s Duet for Microsoft Teams beyond the core capabilities of voice and e911, creating a truly unified communications experience. It is now available for Teams customers who use Bandwidth for Direct Routing in the U.S.”

The new feature is available to Bandwidth customers that utilize the company’s Direct Routing service.

Here’s a video overview:

“As messaging becomes an increasingly preferred way to communicate, employees shouldn’t have to use their personal phone numbers to conduct mission-critical communications–whether with their co-workers inside an organization, or when reaching out to customers, partners, suppliers or other stakeholders,” said John Bell, Bandwidth’s chief product officer, in a statement. “Our new Send-To app is the latest example of Bandwidth’s continuous innovation to expand our longtime partnerships with platform leaders like Microsoft and accelerate the enterprise communications move to the cloud.”

According to Bandwidth the new app:

  • Can be installed quickly and deployed easily
  • Teams users can send SMS and MMS [multimedia] messages from within their Teams channels, on desktop or mobile, using a Bandwidth-provided phone number, which minimizes the need for context switching and increases efficiency
  • It also mitigates the security and governance issues stemming from the use of personal devices for business messaging. To further protect privacy, customers control how messages and contacts are retained within their own Teams tenant.

Bandwidth already offers “Duet for Microsoft Teams” which is says is designed to enable “enterprises can unbundle their telephony and easily integrate their entire communications stack, while replacing legacy telecom carriers and most on-premises equipment with the Bandwidth platform–built on its own global, software-driven, all-IP network.”