June 18, 2021

Tim Jalland, Solution Manager (Microsoft Teams), VOSS

Unisys’ recent acquisition in the UC management space is a super interesting evolution. Increasingly, we see that systems integrators who are supporting their customers as they seek to deploy and adopt the latest advanced collaboration tools, are recognizing they need for a comprehensive and sophisticated management toolset layer to successfully deploy, adopt, manage and operate these collaboration solutions.

With the acceleration of remote and home working and the continuing discussion around hybrid work environments, organizations are upping the priority to source management systems, in the knowledge that they are critical to the health of the underlying collaboration service, and in turn the productivity of the organization.

Although many collaboration solutions come with inbuilt tools – Microsoft Teams, for example, comes with portals for Microsoft 365 and Teams, along with various PowerShell scripts – these are not designed to cover the broader end-to-end management required by larger and more demanding enterprise customers.

Below, I share our experience of working with customers on a global basis, regarding the headline requirements for an enterprise class UC management system.

Reliability

Being able to measure the service in real-time against agreed SLAs, identifying trouble spots and rapidly resolving issues across the complete end-to-end service, and having an element of self-healing in the service to deliver to end users what is, in effect, a utility service.

On Demand

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 day-to-day management – accessed via a straightforward, non-technical portal (in many cases ServiceNow) with suitable security controls in place – automated and efficient.

Microsoft Teams Calling

Adding Enterprise Voice with Microsoft Direct Routing: Enabling the Microsoft Teams client to make and receive calls to the public telephone network without the need to run PowerShell scripts or manage complex configurations in the telephony network itself.

Tracking 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. Having an end-to-end view is critical and measuring performance from a remote public cloud can prove challenging.

Migrating onto the Cloud

Having the tools to examine and validate existing configurations and then transform and load these into the Microsoft Teams service, on a batch schedule that suits the needs of the organization in question.

Hopefully, you found the above check-list helpful, please drop me a line with your thoughts and feedback.