Delivering the Digital Workplace with Microsoft Teams

December 8, 2020

Tim Jalland, Solution Owner (Microsoft Teams), VOSS Solutions

The last nine months have certainly been a period of change, volatility, and the ‘new normal’. Is Microsoft Teams ‘the new normal’ and what are customer expectations for getting onto a Microsoft Teams service? These are my thoughts, from what I have seen, and I would be interested to hear yours.

Very clearly, organizations have had to be highly flexible and dynamic to survive, including being forced to adopt remote and home working. In turn, this has dramatically increased the demands on workplace collaboration tools – keeping organizations productive and efficient.

Organizations that have been successful in delivering the Digital Workplace are now agile, mobile, remote working and fully connected – at any time and from anywhere. For many, Microsoft Teams has become the underlying foundation supporting this – delivered as part of the Microsoft 365 suite of products (and licenses) and having firmly established itself as part of the digital IT ecosystem. Organizations have become highly dependent on Microsoft Teams and this has placed new demands on the service delivery function for partners, providers and enterprise organizations alike. These demands stack up as follows:

1. Reliability
   Measuring the service in real-time, identifying trouble spots and rapidly resolving issues, having an element of self-healing in the service to deliver what is, in effect, a utility service out to users. Gone are the days of poor audio, dropped calls, and frozen displays. Collectively, users work without a break and the service needs to support that.
2. On demand
   Also long gone is the call into the service desk to register a ticket for a service change that is processed manually, such as adding new users or amending service parameters. Organizations now expect to be fully self-service from order through delivery through to day-to-day management – accessed via a straightforward, non-technical portal with suitable security controls in place; automated and efficient.
3. Enterprise voice with Microsoft Direct Routing
   How do you use the Microsoft Teams client for making and receiving calls to the public telephone network? And, is it in a way that allows an organization to keep its numbers, has suitable call and dial plan controls, makes use of the native dialer (encouraging usage), and allows on-net calling with existing systems?
4. Adoption and usage
   Insight into the performance, user experience and feedback from what is a public (internet) cloud delivered service, coupled closely with additional systems that provide facilities such as telephony break-out, call recording, contact center and conferencing. Here, an end-to-end view is critical, and measuring performance from a remote public cloud can prove challenging.

Solving the above involves having a comprehensive view of your UC, and digitizing service delivery and management. You will hear this coined under the term #DigitalServiceDelivery and I will be exploring this theme in more detail in subsequent blog posts over the coming weeks.

Please drop me a line with your thoughts and feedback. It would be great to start a dialogue around #DigitalServiceDelivery with you.