What Are the Top 5 Issues When Moving to Teams?
November 18, 2021
Tim Jalland, Solution Owner (Microsoft Teams), VOSS Solutions
Many organizations have adopted Microsoft Teams for their connected and collaboration solution, to the point that it is now a main pillar in their IT ecosystem. It’s a dynamic landscape: organizations are mid-migration as they move off older legacy systems, new features such as enterprise voice are being introduced, expectations around service level agreements on a cloud solution are being asked for, and against all of this costs and licensing must be managed.
So how are customers coping? We asked our partners and customers – what are the top five challenges facing them as they get onto Microsoft Teams.
1) Growth and rollout of Microsoft Teams – particularly enterprise voice – is being constrained by the complexity of the on-boarding process
The reality of having to deploy skilled staff – who are pulled away from more strategic activities – to operate, debug, and support low level Powershell scripts. These are the things that are used for the migration process, particularly for any bulk change. Can errors in the rollout be traced?
VOSS provides an intuitive portal where individual and bulk changes can be made, without the need to get into low level detailed scripting – all changes are logged for audit purposes, can be rolled back if there are any issues, and can be operated by any engineer in the migration team.
2) Day-to-day changes through the service desk take too long and cost too much
The constant need to hop between different Microsoft Admin portals for each customer in turn – logging in, making a change (which can be quite complex), logging out. Is security an issue?
VOSS provides each service desk agent with a specific role and login account, allowing agents to have visibility of specific customers or sites, supporting regular service requests and changes with automation and workflows to make them fast and efficient, and providing this through a single portal without the need to login to each individual Microsoft administration portal.
3) For the first time, I’m relying on the cloud and don’t have the insight or dashboard to deal with it, or measure against SLAs (service level agreements)
Often, customers approach VOSS with the issue that there is no single place to see the health and performance of the cloud and the various components, to troubleshoot, and to report – even the reports are hard wired.
VOSS’ end-to-end visibility of cloud performance gives real-time information and fast access to status indicators. VOSS empowers self-healing actions to correct problems proactively, and offers measurement and reporting against SLAs. You also get access to a flexible range of reports and dashboards as you want to see information.
4) End user satisfaction could be better – employees want to self-serve and can’t, meaning that all changes have to be routed back through the main service desk – and then these changes take too long and cost too much
Certain features on Microsoft Teams are complex to set-up – call queues and auto attendants specifically. Any local departmental or site administrator – if given access – is able to change anything on the feature and that’s a risk. It’s “The keys to the Microsoft Tenant are all or nothing”.
VOSS offers a multi-layered approach to management, with role-based access, data hierarchy, and display policies so that (for example), local administrators can be given access to add or delete members from a call queue but not be allowed to change the more complex parameters around a feature.
5) Every migration project is late, runs over budget and contains a lot of surprises!
Getting data out of existing systems – numbering, dial plans, user configuration for telephony – is bespoke and very hands-on, and that adds to the risk of migrating to Microsoft Teams. This makes it very difficult to plan, and adds a lot of resources and cost to the project.
VOSS offers discovery capabilities that can be pulled from backup files without the need to intrude on a live system, to highlight areas that are going to be challenging on the migration, and then automation to create a fast, low-friction, and low-cost mechanism to get the configuration data mapped and enabled in Microsoft Teams.
If your organization is facing these – or any other – challenges during your migration to Microsoft Teams, or to discuss how VOSS can help with your transition, please get in touch.
