Delivering the Digital Workplace with Microsoft Teams and Voice
Tim Jalland, Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions
Monday March 14, 2022
It was at an event in New York in November 2016 that Microsoft Teams was first mentioned publicly. And, on March 14, 2017, Microsoft Teams was officially launched to the world.
Microsoft Teams – 5 years old today. Happy Birthday!
5 years later, let’s see how far Microsoft Teams has come:
- 330,000+ companies worldwide using Teams
- 270 million+ Monthly Active Users
- Over 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Teams
- The number of active Teams Rooms devices more than doubled year over year-end of 2021
Not bad in 1,826 days!
In fact, the Microsoft collaboration market is continuing to experience a hugely exciting period of growth. According to Statista, Microsoft 365 – for which Teams forms an increasingly important part – is used by over a million companies worldwide, with over 879,851 companies in the United States alone using the Microsoft Office suite software.
In the December 2021 Quarter, Microsoft’s Teams communications and collaboration platform topped 270 million monthly active users.
Delivering the Digital Workplace with Microsoft Teams and Voice – What’s driving this growth?
Very clearly, hybrid working is here to stay. Over the last two years, organizations have become highly flexible and dynamic to survive, with an unprecedented push towards mobile, remote and home working. Microsoft Teams was perfectly placed to support this. With the Microsoft 365 suite already having a firm footprint as the platform of choice for employee productivity, it was an easy step for organizations to extend their usage and take full advantage of Microsoft Teams.
Roll the clock forward to 2022 and organizations that have been successful in delivering a digital workplace strategy are agile, mobile, hybrid, and fully connected. These organizations are reaping the benefits from this strategy, investing further for growth and integrating new capabilities such as enterprise voice and related applications. All this in turn places new demands on the service delivery function for partners, providers and enterprise organizations alike. These demands are stacking up!
100% reliability is what users expect
Collectively, users work without a break and the service needs to support that. Gone are the days of poor audio, dropped calls, and frozen displays. Having the ability to measure the service in real-time, identify trouble spots, take proactive action and rapidly resolve issues, with an element of self-healing to automate the process.
VOSS Insights can help, giving end-to-end visibility of your service, in your data center and on the cloud, with dashboarding and reporting against agreed SLAs to meet your business needs.
On-demand with control at your fingertips
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.
VOSS Automate can help by streamlining and automating self service requests from administrators.
Enterprise voice with Microsoft direct routing
Organizations are increasingly interested in using the Microsoft Teams client for making and receiving calls to the public telephone network. This needs to be able to allow an organization to keep its existing telephone numbers, with suitable call and dial plan controls, making use of the native dialer to encourage usage, and allowing on-net calling with existing systems.
VOSS Give Teams a Voice can help here, offering a fast and efficient way to migrate telephony to the cloud.
Adoption and usage
Insight into the performance, user experience and feedback from the cloud is critical to tracking adoption and usage on the collaboration service, as you look to make sure all parts of your organization are getting the very best out of the service that is available.
VOSS Analytics supports your dashboarding and reporting requirements, giving actionable intelligence into the user experience.
Next steps
Please drop me a line with your thoughts and feedback. It would be great to start a dialogue around Microsoft Teams and voice with you.
