Salesforce Open CTI is retiring: what Microsoft Teams Customer Contact centers need to know
Salesforce has placed Open CTI in maintenance mode and scheduled its retirement for 28 February 2028. No new features or enhancements are being added, and after the retirement date existing Open CTI implementations will no longer function.
What should replace Open CTI?
Replacing Open CTI does not have to mean replacing your Microsoft Teams setup
Open CTI has traditionally served as the bridge between third-party telephony and the Salesforce interface, enabling features such as screen pops, click-to-dial, and call controls.
Its retirement means organizations relying on that architecture need a migration plan.
But migration does not necessarily require rebuilding the contact center around Salesforce Voice.
With CC4Teams, Customer Contact remains in Microsoft Teams and CC4Teams, while Salesforce continues to provide the customer and business context behind the interaction. CC4Teams provides an API led path forward without depending on Open CTI.
That creates a different model:
Keep the conversation where your teams already work
For organizations already invested in Microsoft Teams, keeping Customer Contact there can simplify the agent experience and avoid adding another communications environment.
CC4Teams handles the interaction, routing, AI, and automation, while Salesforce remains the CRM and system of record.
Salesforce information can help identify the customer and support the handling of an interaction. Relevant outcomes can then flow back into Salesforce when the conversation is complete.
Instead of treating Salesforce as a separate destination for a call log, the CRM becomes part of the wider Customer Contact workflow.
Use the migration as an opportunity
Open CTI retirement is not only a technical deadline.It is also a good moment to review what your Salesforce integration should actually deliver.Should it simply replace an existing connector?
Or should it help:
- keep Customer Contact in Microsoft Teams
- identify the customer and business context behind the interaction
- use Salesforce data to support routing and prioritization
- reduce manual CRM updates after conversations
- connect Customer Contact with the wider Salesforce workflow
That is a much broader question than how to replace Open CTI.
Plan before the deadline becomes the project
28 February 2028 may still feel some distance away, but integration changes involving Salesforce, telephony, routing, workflows, and agent processes take time to assess and migrate properly.
Organizations using Open CTI today should start by understanding where it sits in their current architecture, what depends on it, and what they want the future setup to look like.
But this is not only a migration question.
For organizations already using Microsoft Teams and Salesforce, it is also an opportunity to explore how those two environments can work together more closely.
