Moving from Avaya to a New UC Platform? Think VOSS & M2UC
June 17, 2020
Tom Turrington, Migration Team Lead, VOSS Solutions
One of our current migration projects involves a migration of ~30,000 users from Avaya to Cisco UCM for a large international insurer with offices and call centres in many sites across approximately 15 countries.
As with any migration, once the design of the new system is complete, a robust process and a suite of tools is required to ensure that every batch of the migration can be converted to the new design in a consistent, repeatable manner, with minimal errors.
Whilst there are a core set of concepts, features and settings that exist in both UC platforms – such as devices, call pickup groups and hunt groups – there are various features that work differently or simply do not exist in the other system (coverage paths for example).
This is where VOSS’ tried-and-tested migration methodology and flexible tooling (M2UC) come into their own.
M2UC provides the ability to import data from the source platform, map each individual feature and data item between the systems where necessary and manipulate it with a set of rules that ensure the data is transformed exactly as required. Different batch sizes can be handled with ease (in this case one batch per country) whilst processing and provisioning each batch takes just a matter of minutes, tying up human resources for as short a time as possible.
Additionally, there is the capability to augment the data and apply templates (for example to convert one phone type into another). Optionally, the data can be exported, checked by the end customer and if required, updated – all prior to provisioning (as was the case with this migration).
These features, amongst others, mean that M2UC has met every requirement from both the service provider and the end customer. The flexible design and extendability of M2UC has also meant that extra features can be added with short turnaround times. An example of this is the customer’s desire to set random passwords which they generated, sent to the migration team, and were merged into the data.
In order to streamline the workflow further, reduce customer effort, and speed up the migration, VOSS created the ability to generate random passwords of user-definable length within the rules, tested the new functionality and added it to M2UC – all within a matter of days.
In addition to its flexibility and extensibility, M2UC has been designed with a robust user-friendly interface. Whilst here at VOSS we are more than happy to conduct the entire migration, our end user portal enabled the handing over of the running of this migration to a small team within the service provider, who are successfully processing and provisioning further batches. The team is currently running several weeks ahead of the migration dates – with minimal input from VOSS (simply providing a support role), minimising costs whilst ensuring maximum accuracy.
For more information about M2UC, or to discuss your UC migration project – whether involving Avaya or another UC platform, please contact us.
