A Case Study: Delivering Microsoft Teams Phone to a Large Government Customer

Managing a successful migration and delivery of Microsoft Teams Phone isn’t always a straightforward project, especially when you’re dealing with a large government organization that comprises multiple smaller agencies or departments, running telephony on older PBX systems, and moving to a single Microsoft Teams tenant.

Here at VOSS, we have just completed a successful service delivery for a large US government organization with 150,000 users. Below, I explain how we approached this latest customer deployment.

The specific challenges came down to:

• The single tenant: Benefiting from economies of scale, but how to sub-divide this into services that can be successfully delivered into each agency?
• The mix: Coping with the fact that each agency has different drivers and requirements that inevitably lead to different flavors in the service being delivered; all from a single Microsoft tenant.
• The scale: The tenant is hosting over 100,000 users and a similar number of telephone numbers, plus multiple operator connections and half a million Azure groups and teams.
• Navigating the technical complexity: At this scale, onboarding technical experts within each agency or recruiting a central IT team to service and manage the tenant isn’t a practical or cost effective approach.
• The two-system-syndrome: Telephony was already being provided by an existing Cisco PBX multi-cluster system and that needed to co-exist with Microsoft Teams Phone for the duration of the transition period.

The project was delivered on the customer’s VOSS Automate provisioning platform that was already in use for managing the existing Cisco PBX . This brought confidence that the scale and complexity of the service would not be insurmountable.

The organization was able to use the same provisioning platform to manage Microsoft Teams Phone, which also brought benefits. Service administration and regular changes – such as the onboarding of a new user or the migration of an existing user – could be managed through the existing multi-vendor VOSS portal using the same interface and workflows. That meant a fast ramp up onto Microsoft Teams Phone without the need for retraining service desk agents on Microsoft technology or new administration portals.

The single tenant problem

There is no doubt that government organizations are adopting Microsoft Teams as their core collaboration platform and with that, are starting to migrate older telephony systems onto Microsoft Teams Phone. The benefits in terms of productivity, standardization, digitization, and cost streamlining are significant. However, delivery nearly always takes place from a single Microsoft 365 ‘super’ tenant and with that comes the challenge of delivering services out to individual government agencies; each with their own nuances and requirements.

In this case, the organization had over 1,000 administrators spread across multiple agencies. Therefore, providing them access to make changes directly through the Microsoft 365, Azure and Teams admin centers, with visibility to all users and related service configuration across all agencies, was not feasible.

VOSS overcame this challenge through an inbuilt hierarchy – the ability to divide the tenant into subunits, each with its own services, users, telephony numbers, and devices. Each individual agency could then inherit service definitions from the global single tenant whilst also adding its own customization and preferences to meet specific needs: The best of both worlds.

Integral to the success of the above strategy was the ability to report consumption at a unit level, to accurately raise usage charges against each agency in a timely and automated fashion.