Migrating Jewish Family Services to Microsoft Teams Voice

By David Scott, Managing Member at Avid Communications

Jewish Family Services (JFS) supports and strengthens lives throughout Greater Kansas City. They provide essential human services for people facing challenges in everyday life or times of crisis — regardless of faith, age, culture or lifestyle. JFS proudly serves more than 10,000 people annually, more than half of whom are not Jewish. Their service areas include KesherKC (social services and food pantry), Older Adult Services, Mental Health and Education, and Jewish Life including Chaplaincy.

Avid Communications has provided JFS with an array of services since our earliest days. Don Goldman, the Executive Director of JFS, loves technology but doesn’t usually want to be on the bleeding edge when considering new software or systems. In a recent conversation, we mentioned that Avid has pioneered a migration process for Microsoft Teams Voice. JFS was already using Microsoft Teams, but they were using Zoom Communications for video conferencing.

JFS requires a higher tier subscription to Zoom for HIPAA compliance. (They used Zoom for telehealth patient calls.) The cost for Zoom was thousands of dollars per month, so Microsoft Teams Voice was a compelling alternative for many reasons.

We interviewed Dayton Isbell, Director of Technology for JFS about this project.

Zoom is expensive and doesn’t cater to not for profit organizations. We already use Microsoft Teams internally for chat functionality, department communication and project collaboration. Integration is a valuable thing. If someone on our team is already chatting or communicating with someone through Microsoft Teams, having the phone system integrated was a no brainer.

The migration process was simpler than I expected it to be. I was concerned that switching DIDs to Teams would be a problem. But it only took Avid an hour. We didn’t have to deal with any crazy outages and the call quality is good.

Another benefit of migrating to Microsoft Teams Voice is that we can easily pull external people into a meeting. Even if we’re on a video call, all we have to do is pull down the participants tab from Teams and add another contact to the call. It’s that easy.

We’ve been working with Avid for many years, so we weren’t surprised this migration went smoothly. Mark Lindsay was a big help during the migration process. He was extremely responsive. Any hiccups were resolved quickly. The entire team from Avid has been a pleasure to work with.
– Dayton Isbell, Director of Technology at Jewish Family Services

We appreciate our longstanding relationship with JFS. We love working with companies that are making a difference in the community and in people’s lives. Why? Because the solutions we provide allow them to achieve their mission more efficiently. In other words, we enable them to help even more people because they can communicate effectively. We are proud to have JFS as a client and look forward to supporting them for years to come!