Bringing automation and AI to cloud UC and voice

As part of a “cloud first” strategy, most organizations have moved all or part of their UC and voice, to platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, or Zoom; a move seen as critical to support the transition to digital workplace and flexible working.

Your situation: The migration is complete. The collaboration service is handed over to the operations team to manage and run. The next step is what many organizations call “maturing the service”. This involves improving the user experience, ensuring service reliability for all users, accommodating new user requirements, driving efficiencies, and cost and license optimization.

With this as a backdrop, it’s great to see the launch of the next major release of VOSS Automate (Version 24.1), with new capabilities that help IT managers address these important topics.

Introducing VOSS Automate 24.1

VOSS Automate offers automation and administration for both on-premises and cloud UC, across Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, and Zoom, from a single unified portal, delivering benefits in terms of efficiency, agility, and standardization:

• Workflow automation for onboarding, licensing, and moves, adds, and changes
• Administration by local IT teams with business hierarchy and RBAC controls
• Visibility of all your telephone number ranges in one place ( available / used / by site)
• Integration with existing systems and processes (such as ServiceNow)
• Standardization to capture regular configuration packages and personas
• Bulk changes with inbuilt audit logging and roll back
• Discovery and onboarding from older platforms that are reaching the end of life

VOSS Automate V24.1 extends these benefits with several new and exciting features:

VOSS Copilot AI Assistant

This release introduces Wingman, the new VOSS copilot that leverages powerful machine learning capabilities, allowing admins and users to ask questions about VOSS Automate and to query their UC data. This new feature enables administrators and users to ask any question and receive summarized answers along with reference links to the documentation portal. Further, Wingman can respond to a user’s UC data query by providing a data count and a direct link to the relevant filtered list.

Visualization options and configurable dashboards to track important assets

Integrated alongside the automation, administration, and role-based access controls, the extended dashboarding capability in VOSS Automate helps track important assets such as users, number inventory, services, and activity (service requests and transactions).

Dashboards deliver new visualization capabilities and enable powerful, flexible options for consuming and presenting data. Controls are included for configuring the data visualization (a range of dashboard widgets are included by default) and data processing elements such as counts and trends.

Extended support for cloud UC

Keeping pace with feature development on the major UC cloud platforms, the latest release from VOSS includes:

• Updates to administer the latest Microsoft feature settings and policies
• Operational workflows to set emergency location information on unassigned numbers
• Microsoft dial plan management, using templates to standardize deployments
• Extended service MACDs for Webex Phones, Analog Adapters, and WiFi devices
• Microsoft Exchange in the multi-vendor subscriber view

The release also takes advantage of certificate-based authentication with Microsoft, to benefit from improved security, moving away from the more traditional and less secure basic service accounts that were used previously.

IPv6 support

Introduced with the new release is native support for IPv6. Although IPv4 is still prevalent, IPv6 delivers several key benefits:

• Address space expansion – IPv6 implements a 128-bit address space, providing room for future growth
• Improved routing efficiency – IPv6 simplifies and improves routing efficiency by reducing the size of routing tables and enabling hierarchical address allocation, leading to faster and more efficient packet forwarding
• Enhanced security – IPv6 includes IPsec (Internet Protocol Security) support as a standard feature, ensuring data integrity, confidentiality, and authentication at the IP layer
• Better performance – Features such as StateLess Address Auto Configuration (SLAAC) and Network Address Translation (NAT) elimination streamline network configuration and management, reducing latency and improving overall performance