Imagine making the complex simple. 

It’s the holy grail, of course – particularly when it comes to scaled technological processes upon which the size of financial bottom lines can often depend. 

Effectively-automated commissioning, deployment, management and support is the efficiency-boosting stuff of dreams; regardless of your place in the provider/reseller/user chain. 

And, as business continues to benefit from seemingly constant technological advances, it’s a clever trick with the capability to change everything at a single stroke. 

Take Microsoft Teams: arguably the most prolific of all recent advances. 

Adoption rates have soared exponentially and many organisations have sought to leverage much more of its functionality than was originally fashionable. 

At scale – when the user numbers are seriously big and demand for support is constantly high – simplification and automation are king and queen. 

“Adding new users and removing old ones is complex and time-consuming so we developed a one click solution,” says Bruno Guirardel, Product Head at French-based global software expert Kurmi, which is dedicated to the provisioning and administration of enterprise unified communications and collaboration tools. 

“It saves 20 minutes per new user by removing the need to go through a Microsoft interface, with all the associated sign-on fields and questions, and there is no Microsoft certification required because all of that is embedded in our software” 

“The same efficiencies also apply when decommissioning a user. It deletes all of that person’s details from the system in one go and simultaneously reassigns the resulting spare licence. 

“Doing all of that manually at scale via Microsoft can be a serious challenge for a skilled enterprise IT team, so imagine the issues for an SMB if the local administrator is not an IT person and has limited expertise. 

“That’s when simplification and automation REALLY delivers.” 

The dynamics are intensified when legacy systems and a hurried move to the cloud are at play – both of which are an increasingly prevalent element of many businesses’ operational strategies. 

And then there’s Teams integration with telephony to consider; multi-device compatibility; constant user demand for feature-rich upgrades; complex and critical security considerations; and often a single centralised IT team managing licences and devices across multiple geographical territories. 

That can mean a lot of people spinning a lot of plates. 

Ergo: inefficiency.  

“In the past, legacy on-premise systems had just one inefficient response to all of those individual and different challenges but the landscape is much more complex now,” says Guirardel. 

“Microsoft’s Teams Admin Center does not allow a user organisation to restrict its employees’ view, so an administrator has access to all users. 

“The risk of errors and security issues is high. Our role-based access control feature is crucial to offloading IT experts safely. In short, with Kurmi you can delegate efficiently and securely” 

The Kurmi solution also connects to all third-party applications via its SDK connector – creating a single pane of glass through which to manage multiple apps such as ServiceNow or Active Director, not only those dedicated to UC. 

It is able to isolate the administration of resources per site and/or country, and set user profiles accordingly.

For example, an organisation might want to make a user change at its New York office but it doesn’t want that to break everything for people at the Paris office.  

“If organisations fail to provide their people with effective solutions, they quickly set up their own,” says Guirardel.  

“When the pandemic struck, lots of people instantly set up their own Zoom accounts so they could continue collaborating and working. 

“That created a nightmare for IT departments because they had no control. Automation solves all of that.” 

In the case of Microsoft Teams, the potential efficiencies of automation are huge due to the economies of scale inherent in the still-growing level of adoption.  

Post-pandemic, there is little reason to imagine a slowdown. 

With Kurmi, organisations can master the use of their Microsoft 365 licences; leveraging specific IT Administrator dashboards designed to anticipate the need for additional users and avoid payment for unnecessary resource. 

“The move to the cloud is still ongoing for a large number of organisations,” says Kurmi’s Microsoft Product Owner Vincent Le Thiec. 

“Many legacy organisations want to migrate to Teams; some in order to utilise just the in-house collaboration functionality, others to facilitate an entire migration of their telephony.  

“Those organisations obviously have to move with caution and care and they have to modify their use cases and learn new ways of working. 

“It can be very hard for them to change but we are able to help by simplifying the language and automating the process.” 

“In turn, we can help save them money too.”  

Now, which of your customers wouldn’t like the sound of THAT..?   

To learn more about Kurmi’s Teams telephony solution, watch Bruno Guirardel’s live Microsoft Commsverse presentation How to Avoid Headaches when Managing and Migrating to Teams Telephony with Direct Routing at 2pm CEST on September 16. 

Webinar: How to accelerate Microsoft Teams Telephony with Direct Routing

 

 



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