The remote revolution? That’s so 2020. Today we’re all cloud-enabled and ready to work from anywhere, surely?
When it comes to internal collaboration and communication, the answer is resoundingly positive, with organisations all over the world having made the transition — almost overnight in many cases — to Microsoft Teams as their digital office. However, for making calls in and out of the enterprise, to clients and customers, many are still lagging behind on cloud transformation — which is holding them back technologically, and reducing their agility and future resilience.
Voice: the final frontier
Tim Jalland, Solution Manager for Microsoft Teams at VOSS Solutions, explained why this last step is now urgently needed
“The preferred outcomes are clear — people want to use the Teams client that they’ve got on their desktop and click the dialler or the contact card in there, to make a voice call,” he explained. “Organisations are using Teams for internal chat and sharing, and on the other hand, they’re using a completely separate system for the voice and telephony side. So, it’s a bit schizophrenic for them, they’ve got two applications they’re working with on the desktop where they want one. They don’t want to keep these two things as islands, with no connection between them.”
But while the capability to migrate voice services is all natively available in Teams, the specialist skills needed, particularly to manage a changeover at scale, are not always available in-house.
“Migration en-masse means using PowerShell scripts,” Jalland continued, “You tend to need quite specialist people with deep, technical skills to manage all that.” So, what happens instead is people attempt to do the process manually, which is fraught with difficulty. “With a manual transition, you tend to get errors creeping in. It’s not easy to put a robust, predictable process in place that rolls this out across the organisation. When you start to scale this up, you need a more reliable process.”
UC migration automation
VOSS’ migration automation solutions start from where an enterprise is right now, to design and manage a transition to where they want to end up — taking account of legacy systems which are frequently disparate and complex.
“Many people use a migration project as an opportunity to optimise as well,” he pointed out, “so we sit down with the customer to map out what they want the new state to look like — we discuss zero-touch workflows, things they could do differently, different services they might want to bring on, how to manipulate groups of users so they appear or interact in different ways. Customers are sometimes surprised by how much is possible”
The VOSS migration product, M2UC, incorporates a highly sophisticated migration engine and uses a revolutionary methodology to discover, extract, transform, validate, and load any volume of users, devices, and UC services — to create a frictionless on-ramp to Microsoft Teams voice, via an intuitive web portal.
A better way to manage business transformation
Automated migration is a very different process to the 2020 rush to remote working, and the way Teams was adopted across many organisations — while ironically bringing them to a point of true remote-readiness, and which will act as insurance against any future black swan event requiring workforce flexibility. Cloud-based voice calling is a sound way to underpin your business continuity strategy.
This is a planned, well-managed, implemented, and evaluated change management process, which brings users to a better place — and towards truly unified communications, instead of operating (at least) two separately siloed systems.
Taking the final step to fully implement Microsoft Teams by transitioning voice services is the missing piece of the future-of-work jigsaw. “There is a lot of talk among enterprise organisations about evolving to a digital workplace. The VOSS migration solution offers every organisation truly mobile agile working to achieve that goal,” Jalland concluded.
“Whatever the future looks like, the greatest flexibility and resilience will come from completing this migration”
To learn more about VOSS migration solutions for Microsoft Teams, please visit VOSS.
