The mass move to Teams is there for all to see, with the platform hitting 145 million daily active users just four years after its launch.
But, for many, the migration to Teams for voice communications is not as simple as flipping a switch.
Jason Wyatt and Justin Stevens, of AudioCodes, recently talked UC Today through how they help businesses take a measured approach to their Teams voice migration. You can view the whole discussion here.
Businesses of all shapes and sizes, in a wide range of industries, face unique challenges when it comes to shedding their legacy systems and adopting Microsoft’s offering, Wyatt said.
“If you’re a small and medium enterprise you’ve maybe got the ability to adopt Teams more quickly because there are fewer barriers, but when you look towards larger enterprises – especially those that are across multiple geographies – there could be lots of things that come into play,” he added.
“That could include the number of different voice platforms that are already in place; the number of users that have to be trained and migrated; any analogue requirements that need to be looked into; even the element of coexistence with existing systems”
“Lots of organisations suffer from different barriers to taking on Teams straight away and that’s where we can help.”
To help businesses address the different components of a Teams voice migration, AudioCodes has established a set of five pillars that can be used as benchmarks along the way.
We’ve summed up the five pillars below, but you can watch AudioCodes’ Stevens talk through each of them in more detail here.
The Five Pillars of Successful Teams Migration
- Time to production: This relates to the time needed to complete a migration to Teams, taking everything into account including how long it will take to train staff, what tools the business will require, etc.
- Ease of buying: These concerns how businesses both turn off their legacy solution and how they purchase the new platform. Cloud-based platforms such as Teams have predictable pricing because of their subscription nature, but businesses still need to obtain visibility of what infrastructure they already have and calculate how much it will cost to move away from it.
- Cloud scale and virtualisation: The next stage is to look at how businesses can reach their cloud infrastructure mandates and reduce on-premises hardware, while also reaching the appropriate scale with their new solution.
- Report Services: This pillar is designed to make sure that IT managers have the required data and reporting to manage the system once it has been deployed.
- Operations and Services: The final pillar takes an overarching view of the entire migration, ensuring that businesses have the plan, budget and vision to migrate successfully.
The full AudioCodes report – Five Value Pillars for Teams Success – can be downloaded here.
How to Get Started
There are many businesses out there that are well on their way to a successful Teams migration that includes voice, but many will be struggling or just getting started – whether it be creating a pilot programme or preparing employees for the change.
AudioCodes recently created LaunchPad, which is a series of interactive online workshops designed to help companies get started.
LaunchPad initially catered for the US market but has been such a success that AudioCodes is bringing it to EMEA over the coming months.
“We wanted to take the one-to-one type workshops that we have traditionally done and help businesses that are a little bit earlier in the journey,” Stevens said.
“There are some general technical aspects and challenges that they’re faced with, and they just need a few little answers to get them jump-started, so we packaged up these workshop efforts that we’ve typically done over two days and tried to take it to a larger audience over a series of two-hour sessions”
“We help them construct their reason why, and tie that back to their business plan; then we help them take the business plan and build out a technical plan now they know their requirements; that technical plan then drives user adoption and user experience, or device requirement, and then we can move into some of the higher-level aspects such as network redundancy and handling analogue devices.
“It’s about how we can consultatively build a discussion that helps everyone move a little bit further on their journey to making Microsoft Teams their primary voice platform.”
from UC Today https://ift.tt/3ybnFCp
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