All over the world, companies are rapidly transitioning to more flexible solutions for communications and collaboration. As the traditional PBX becomes increasingly unsuitable for a landscape of omnichannel, anywhere communications, “Unified Communications” solutions are gaining steam.
The market for Unified Communications is set to reach a value of around $385.21 billion by 2030, thanks to unprecedented growth. Unfortunately, transitioning into the ideal UC environment isn’t without its challenges.
Today, countless companies are transitioning into the Microsoft Teams landscape to enhance their communication stack. Though these companies already have the ideal UC solution in mind, they still need to manage the migration process from their existing communication ecosystem.
Whether companies are shifting into the UC environment for the first time or moving their services to a new vendor, there are various migratory issues to overcome. The process of discovery and migration involved in a UC strategy can be time-consuming, stressful, and even expensive in some cases. Fortunately, there are ways to make the transition smoother.
Bill Dellara, VP of Product at VOSS Solutions, said: “Managing a UC migration process can be complex and costly. Large parts of the migration are often manual and run over a long period, which consume technical resources.
“There is a risk of human error and data slippage, and a tricky period, mid-migration, where the UC data needs to be maintained in two places at once. Companies are increasingly looking to UC migration solutions that provide a single view across all systems - old and new - during the transition. And. there is a growing need to automate the transfer of UC services to the new platform in a predictable and streamlined way.
“This is where VOSS can help. We have been automating large UC migration projects for companies around the world for many years. As a result, our customers can harness a more efficient process, while achieving faster time to benefits and a better user experience.”
The Challenges of UC Discovery and Migration
The first step in developing an effective strategy for UC Discovery and Migration is understanding the challenges you might face. While the migratory process can vary for each company, depending on their existing communication platforms and change management structure, some of the key issues businesses need to overcome include deciding how to:
- Audit and analyse existing setups, configurations, and usage data
- Collect and manage the data inventory for each user, server, and device
- Extract, review, and map the migration process including highlighting any feature gaps
- Automate repetitive and complex tasks in the migration strategy
- Manage complex issues like multi-vendor migrations and on-premises to cloud transitions
- Apply transformational changes during a migration
- Make mass MACD changes to existing data (e.g., site moves, dial plan updates etc.)
Here are some critical steps companies can take to simplify and accelerate migration.
Step 1: Explore Your Existing Environment
The first step in any effective migration process is discovery. Once businesses know which UC environment they want to move to, such as Microsoft Teams, they need to assess their existing PBX configuration to determine how exactly they will transition.
Assessing the existing environment carefully is the first step in understanding what features need to be migrated, what may need to be changed, and what kind of challenges may be faced along the way. Users will need to know the following:
What the existing PBX environment includes
How many users, services, devices, and numbers need to be migrated
Whether there are any gaps between the current configuration and the new system
Some innovators in the UC space already offer solutions to assist with this process. For instance, the VOSS Migrate service provides companies access to a sophisticated three-stage migration strategy, starting with the discovery process.
The “Discover” section of the solution provides a comprehensive insight into the existing communication setup and how it can be migrated into leading tools like Microsoft Teams. The Discover “Plus” plan even comes with a planning workshop to get users started.
