Intermedia Elevate and Microsoft Teams: What Your DFW Business Gets From the Integration

If your business runs Microsoft Teams for collaboration and chat, you already know the problem. Teams is excellent for meetings, messaging, and file sharing. However, it does not give you a full enterprise phone system. You either pay for a Microsoft Teams Phone license on top of your existing Microsoft 365 subscription, or your team ends up switching between Teams and a separate phone app dozens of times a day.

Intermedia Elevate — NTi Technologies’ recommended cloud phone system for Dallas-Fort Worth businesses — solves this through a deep, native integration with Microsoft Teams. The integration goes well beyond presence sync. It embeds enterprise-grade calling, SMS, voicemail, and contact center features directly inside the Teams interface, without requiring a Teams Phone license. This article covers how the integration works, how to set up presence sync, and what your team gains from running Elevate alongside Teams.

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What Intermedia Elevate Brings to Microsoft Teams

The Intermedia Elevate Teams integration operates through two components that work together: the Elevate Teams Embedded App, which installs directly inside Teams and gives users a full softphone experience without leaving the Teams interface, and the Elevate Teams Desktop Plugin, which handles active call control and presence synchronization.

Together, these components deliver capabilities that Microsoft Teams alone cannot provide.

Enterprise-Grade Calling Inside Teams

With the Elevate Teams Embedded App installed, your team places and receives business calls directly from the Teams interface using their Elevate business number. No separate phone app. No app switching. The full Elevate PBX feature set — call queues, call forwarding, call recording, voicemail transcription, auto-attendant, and advanced call routing — is available from the same application your team already uses for meetings and chat.

Business SMS From Within Teams

Elevate’s Teams integration includes business SMS — your team can send and receive text messages from their business number without leaving the Teams app. This keeps business texting separate from personal messaging and creates a searchable record of customer text conversations alongside other communication history.

No Teams Phone License Required

One of the most significant advantages of the Elevate Teams integration is cost. Businesses that run Teams natively for calling pay for a Microsoft Teams Phone Standard license on top of their Microsoft 365 subscription. Elevate’s embedded integration eliminates that requirement. You get enterprise-grade business telephony inside Teams without the additional Microsoft licensing cost.

Built-In Business Continuity

If Microsoft Teams experiences an outage — and it does, periodically — businesses running Teams Phone lose their calling capability entirely. Elevate’s integration includes a built-in continuity layer. When Teams goes down, your team can still place and receive calls through the Elevate mobile or web app. Customers keep reaching you. Operations keep running.

AI-Powered Contact Center Add-On

For businesses with higher call volume or customer service teams, Elevate’s AI-powered Contact Center integrates directly into Teams as well. Call queues, monitor, whisper, barge, wallboards, and advanced call analytics are all available inside the Teams interface. The Contact Center add-on gives your customer-facing teams enterprise call center capabilities without a separate application.

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Presence Sync: How It Works

Presence sync keeps your availability status consistent between Elevate and Microsoft Teams — so your colleagues always see an accurate picture of whether you are available, on a call, or away, regardless of which system triggered the status change.

Prerequisites

Before enabling presence sync, confirm the following:

• You have Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) access with Microsoft Office 365 Global Administrator rights
• Your Elevate account contact has the Security Manager role assigned in HostPilot
• The email address on your Elevate HostPilot account and your Azure AD account match exactly — including case (Intermedia recommends lowercase for both)

If you have both Elevate and an Intermedia Contact Center, and you have already activated Teams Presence Sync for the Contact Center, deactivate that sync first. Activating presence sync through Elevate will also synchronize presence with Contact Center automatically.

Enabling Elevate to Teams Presence Sync (One-Way)

This direction pushes your Elevate status into Teams. When you mark yourself on a call or away in Elevate, Teams reflects that status automatically.

1. Log in to HostPilot using your Account Contact credentials (Security Manager role required)
2. Navigate to Account > Security Policies > Identity Management
3. Click Setup Azure Integration
4. Sign in to your Azure account using Global Administrator credentials and accept any permissions requests
5. Scroll down to Presence Synchronization with Microsoft Teams and click Enable Presence Sync
6. Re-authenticate your Azure account when prompted and grant permission to access presence information

Enabling Teams to Elevate Presence Sync (Two-Way)

For full two-way sync — where your Teams status also updates your Elevate status — you need a dedicated Azure AD sync user. Intermedia recommends creating a new user in Azure AD specifically for this purpose, rather than using an existing administrator account.

Creating the sync user in Azure:

1. Log in to the Microsoft Azure AD admin center
2. Navigate to Users from the left-hand menu
3. Click + New User and select Create user
4. Assign a username that clearly identifies this as the presence sync user — for example, teamsync@yourdomain.com
5. Set a password (note it — you will need it in the next steps)
6. Click Create to confirm
7. If prompted to change the password on first login, complete that step before proceeding — failing to do so will generate an “Azure login error: has first login password change been completed?” error when enabling sync

Completing the two-way sync setup:

1. Return to HostPilot > Account > Security Policies > Identity Management
2. Under Presence Synchronization with Microsoft Teams, enter the sync user’s login and password
3. Save the configuration

Note: Presence sync updates in Microsoft Teams may take up to 30 seconds. Rapid status changes can cause temporary sync delays — the system is designed for real-world use patterns rather than frequent manual status switching.

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Presence Status Mapping

When status changes in one system, here is how it maps to the other:

Teams status → Elevate status

Elevate status → Teams status

Note: Offline presence does not sync in either direction. Sync only occurs when the user is active in both systems.

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Disabling Presence Sync

To turn off presence sync between Elevate and Teams:

1. Log in to HostPilot with Account Contact credentials (Security Manager role required)
2. Navigate to Account > Security Policies > Identity Management
3. Scroll to Presence Synchronization with Microsoft Teams
4. Click Disable and confirm when prompted

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Why Elevate Is NTi’s Recommended Teams Integration for DFW Businesses

Businesses running Microsoft Teams for collaboration have several options for adding business phone capabilities. Teams Phone Direct Routing, third-party SIP connectors, and standalone UCaaS platforms all exist in the market. Elevate’s embedded integration stands apart because it delivers the full enterprise phone system experience inside Teams without requiring a separate Microsoft calling license — and it does so backed by Intermedia’s 99.999% uptime SLA and J.D. Power-certified 24/7 support.

For NTi clients, that support extends to a local DFW team. When your Teams integration needs configuration changes, when presence sync behaves unexpectedly, or when you want to add Contact Center capabilities to your Teams environment, you reach a person who knows your system — not a national support queue.

Contact our team to discuss the Elevate Teams integration for your business, or to get a free assessment of your current Microsoft 365 and phone system setup.