Seize the DAY-2 with VOSS-4-UC’s Business Admin Portal

July 8, 2020

Dan Payne, CTO, VOSS Solutions

Unified Communications is transforming the way we work and communicate every day. This is especially true now, being in such a unique situation with the onset of COVID-19, that most of us are having to adapt to a work-from-home environment. It’s also driving the massive uptake in collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, replacing the traditional desk phone as a means of talking to colleagues and customers. To put it into perspective, Zoom’s daily meeting participants surged from a mere 10 million users at the end of 2019 to upward of 200 million by March – 190 million new customers in just 3 months! This sudden shift presents many enterprises with enormous IT challenges, i.e. making sure the right people have the right tools to keep doing their jobs. It is critical that your staff have the right tools to deal with all these evolving changes.

The incredible rate of acceleration of adoption of UC tools is putting huge pressure on organizations to respond in a rapid and very agile manner to these evolving demands. To help our customers meet this demand effectively, VOSS released the Business Admin Portal (BAP), built on top of VOSS-4-UC, the market-leading UC automation platform. We designed this portal specifically for IT and operations teams who need to efficiently adopt new capabilities and make day-to-day changes to their UC platform without requiring weeks or months of training. The strength of the portal automating and simplifying making changes to staff communication tools and services as things change on a daily basis (Day-2 MACDs).

VOSS continues to evolve our product usability and flexibility, and BAP is the latest evolution in our ongoing drive to provide the very best in UC management. BAP is a much more intuitive way to administer your UC assets – it provides greater levels of automation and simplicity which reduces effort (and hence costs) to perform a wide wide range of frequently used MACD tasks. With BAP, our customers can decentralize administration further than ever, giving the stakeholders more control to manage specific areas of the business, and allowing basic tasks to be automated, or self-managed, or devolved, so that response times are faster, change happens quicker, and technical staff are free to focus on higher value tasks.

Business Admin Portal supports managing both traditional telephony services such as Cisco and Avaya phones, voicemail, extension mobility, etc. as well as the leading cloud collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Webex Teams. This means that whatever mix of communication tools your organization is using, you’ll have a single, easy-to-use portal to manage all of this from.

What to expect?

On initial login, you’re presented with a dashboard that provides an overview of some key pieces of information such as the number of users and phones. Basic analytics is integrated throughout the interface providing users with key insights into how users are consuming the various services in their organization. For more advanced analytics, have a look at our VOSS Analytics solution.

The portal is designed to be intuitive, even for non-technical users tasked with making basic updates. The powerful VOSS-4-UC role-based-access-control system allows every aspect of the interface to be controlled in terms of what specific users can see and do. Additional features and MACDs (moves, add, changes and deletes) can also be added to any of the feature dashboards to meet the organization’s specific needs.

The inherent complexity of managing communications systems has been hidden away in this portal. Every change the user makes is coupled with carefully designed workflows and templates to ensure that consistent and accurate configuration is applied to the underlying communications systems.

Here are just some of the things that can be done using the Business Admin Portal.

Watch the video to see some of this in action:

• Add new users (subscribers) from predefined profiles
  • These profiles are fully customizable and determine the services that will be enabled for a user as well as the configuration settings.
  • The profiles can be any mix of services for e.g. Cisco HCS + Zoom or Avaya Aura + Microsoft Teams
• Create saved searches to quickly find users, phones, or anything for that matter, right from the dashboard
• Manage your number inventory
  • The number inventory keeps track of how numbers are used and assigned to users and their services
• Perform many user-related MACDs from the subscriber overview page
  • Update personal information
  • Reset pin/password
  • Add/remove the user to/from hunt groups and pickup groups
  • Log the user into and out of phones
  • Reset/Replace the user’s phone
  • Add/remove services based on the user’s entitlement
• Manage the settings for a whole range of telephony and collaboration tools
  • Cisco and Avaya phones, voicemail, hunt groups, pickup groups
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Webex Teams
  • Zoom

What’s more, VOSS offers easy self-paced training for BAP. Find out more, here.

To find out more about VOSS-4-UC Business Admin Portal, please email [email protected].