Cisco Archives | VOSS Solutions Digital Workplace Management Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:12:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Bringing Simplicity to Cisco Webex Contact Center Management https://www.voss-solutions.com/blog/2025/bringing-simplicity-to-cisco-webex-contact-center-management/ https://www.voss-solutions.com/blog/2025/bringing-simplicity-to-cisco-webex-contact-center-management/#respond Tue, 10 Jun 2025 10:03:38 +0000 http://www.voss-solutions.com/?p=21846 Author: Keith Bareham Product Manager, VOSS Solutions Tuesday June 10, 2025 As contact centers evolve to meet the demands of a hybrid workforce and the increasing expectations of digital customers, managing them has become more complex than ever. Organizations are adopting cloud-based platforms like Webex [...]

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Cisco

Keith Bareham, Product Manager, VOSS Solutions
Author: Keith Bareham
Product Manager, VOSS Solutions

Tuesday June 10, 2025

As contact centers evolve to meet the demands of a hybrid workforce and the increasing expectations of digital customers, managing them has become more complex than ever. Organizations are adopting cloud-based platforms like Webex Contact Center to deliver flexible, scalable, and intelligent customer engagement experiences. But with this evolution comes new challenges.

The industry challenge

Many organizations are struggling to efficiently manage cloud contact center environments. The transition to platforms like Webex Contact Center often introduces fragmented administration, where managing users, licenses, agent settings, and experience configurations requires switching between multiple portals and tools.

For example, in the Webex Control Hub, administrators can assign licenses and manage user profiles. But configuring the customer and desktop experience must be done separately via the Contact Center portal. This fragmented workflow introduces inefficiencies:

  • Increased administrative overhead and operational costs
  • Risk of human error due to repetitive, manual processes
  • Slower agent onboarding and longer time-to-service
  • Limited visibility and control over configurations
  • Inconsistent access control, with admins often given broader privileges than necessary

For organizations managing thousands of users and agents – or delivering managed services across multiple tenants – these inefficiencies scale quickly into operational headaches that undermine agility, customer experience, and profitability.

Cisco Prime Collaboration replacement - Happy man using headset with laptop at desk

VOSS Automate now supports Webex Contact Center

To address these challenges, VOSS has extended our Webex management capabilities to include full support for Webex Contact Center. With this enhancement, organizations can now manage agents and a wide range of contact center configuration items from a centralized, intelligent interface in VOSS Automate.

Streamlined agent provisioning from a single interface

VOSS significantly simplifies agent management by consolidating multi-step workflows into a single page. The enhanced Webex Quick Add Subscriber feature allows administrators to:

  • Create a Webex user
  • Assign the appropriate Webex Contact Center license
  • Configure agent settings based on pre-defined templates

This eliminates the need to jump between Webex Control Hub and the Contact Center portal – reducing provisioning time, improving consistency, and minimizing errors.

Centralized configuration of contact center components

VOSS supports configuration of a wide array of Webex Contact Center components, including:

  • Desktop profiles and multimedia profiles – to define the agent desktop experience
  • Skills and skill profiles – to route customers to the right agent with the right expertise
  • Queues and channels – to shape the customer journey
  • Contact service queues, entry points, and teams – to structure workflows and resource allocation
  • Business hours, holidays, and overrides – for scheduling and exception handling
  • User personalization settings – to tailor the agent experience

Some elements such as audio files, dial plans, and flows are available in read-only mode to protect core configurations while still providing visibility.

Granular role-based access control (RBAC)

Unlike the access profiles in Webex Control Hub, VOSS offers granular RBAC and hierarchy management. This allows organizations to precisely control what each administrator can see and do:

  • A local admin responsible for a single site can be restricted to managing users, settings, and address books for that site only
  • Settings can be enabled or disabled individually
  • Default values can be applied to prevent errors and enforce consistency
  • Multi-tenant or distributed teams can be segmented with no risk of cross-site configuration interference

This enables decentralized administration without sacrificing control or governance – empowering local admins to act quickly without routing every request through a central team.

The business impact

These Webex Contact Center enhancements in VOSS Automate unlock significant operational and strategic benefits:

  • Reduced operational costs: Fewer manual tasks, fewer errors, and less time spent navigating complex admin interfaces
  • Faster agent onboarding: New hires can be licensed, configured, and ready to go in minutes
  • Improved consistency and compliance: Templates and fine-grained RBAC enforce best practices across the board
  • Increased agility: Local administrators can manage their own domains without relying on central support teams
  • Enhanced scalability: Whether managing one site or dozens, VOSS Automate scales effortlessly with your business
  • Better customer experiences: Faster agent readiness and more accurate routing improve service quality at every step

As customer experience becomes a strategic differentiator, the ability to quickly and accurately manage Webex Contact Center environments is essential. VOSS Automate brings that power to your fingertips—turning complexity into control and unlocking the full potential of your Webex investment.

Want to learn more?

Contact us to schedule a demo or discuss your use case.

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Optimizing UC: How VOSS helped a global enterprise streamline Cisco and Microsoft Teams https://www.voss-solutions.com/blog/2024/optimizing-uc-how-voss-helped-a-global-enterprise-streamline-cisco-and-microsoft-teams/ https://www.voss-solutions.com/blog/2024/optimizing-uc-how-voss-helped-a-global-enterprise-streamline-cisco-and-microsoft-teams/#respond Tue, 10 Sep 2024 15:02:24 +0000 http://www.voss-solutions.com/?p=19147 Connecting the Digital Workplace to SBC as a Service Author: VOSS Team Tuesday September 10,  2024 Last month, a multinational enterprise relying on both Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Teams to ensure seamless communication across multiple platforms, devices, and geographies, approached VOSS for help. Their [...]

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Cisco

Author: VOSS Team

Tuesday September 10,  2024

Last month, a multinational enterprise relying on both Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Teams to ensure seamless communication across multiple platforms, devices, and geographies, approached VOSS for help.

Their setup included Cisco for their backend infrastructure and WebEx as their preferred platform for meeting management, but Microsoft Teams was the tool of choice for video conferencing. Despite having robust platforms in place, they faced several operational challenges, particularly in the areas of monitoring, incident management, and process automation.

The challenge: Managing a complex, multi-vendor UC stack

The customer’s communication ecosystem was both expansive and complex. With approximately 250 meeting rooms equipped with Cisco devices across multiple continents, maintaining operational efficiency was a daunting task. Although their backend technology was anchored in Cisco WebEx, the predominance of Teams for video conferencing created a fragmented monitoring landscape. Specifically, they faced:

Limited monitoring and control for Teams Meetings

While their WebEx environment was well-monitored through the Cisco Control Hub, visibility into Teams meetings was lacking. This disparity left a critical gap in their ability to manage and optimize their unified UC infrastructure.

Global voice services integration

The company relied on AudioCodes’ One Voice Operations Center to manage global voice services, but the solution fell short in providing the level of integration and clarity needed. Additionally, some critical voice services, such as voice recording, were not adequately monitored.

Reactive incident management

The company struggled with identifying and resolving incidents before they impacted users, relying too heavily on end-user reports for issue detection. This reactive approach led to delays in service restoration and impacted overall communication reliability.

Manual meeting room creation

The process of setting up new meeting rooms was cumbersome, involving manual coordination between Active Directory and ServiceNow. The company recognized the need for automation to streamline these processes and reduce administrative overhead.

UC today article about How to leverage a Microsoft/Cisco partnership to optimize the new multi-vendor hybrid office

The solution: VOSS single-pane-of-glass insight

Understanding the complexity of the customer’s environment, VOSS proposed a solution designed to unify monitoring, management, and automation across their multi-vendor landscape. Here’s how VOSS addressed their key challenges:

Enhanced monitoring and control for Teams Meetings

VOSS provided a centralized management platform that offered comprehensive monitoring and control across both Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Teams environments. This single-pane-of-glass approach allowed the customer to view and manage all video conferencing activities from a unified dashboard. This not only bridged the gap between WebEx and Teams monitoring but also provided deeper insights into the performance and utilization of their communications tools, enabling proactive management and optimization.

Seamless integration and monitoring of global voice services

VOSS extended its monitoring capabilities to include the customer’s global voice services managed by AudioCodes. By integrating with their existing infrastructure, VOSS offered a more holistic view of their voice service operations, including previously unmonitored critical services like voice recording. This integration facilitated better oversight and control, ensuring that all aspects of their voice communications were consistently managed and maintained.

Automated incident identification and resolution

To address the customer’s need for more proactive incident management, VOSS implemented automated incident detection and alerting mechanisms. These tools were designed to identify and flag potential issues in the video conferencing and voice service environments before they escalated, allowing IT teams to take corrective action quickly. This automation significantly reduced the dependency on end-user reports, improving overall service reliability and reducing downtime.

Streamlined meeting room creation processes

VOSS introduced automation into the customer’s meeting room creation processes, which had previously been manual and time-consuming. By integrating with Active Directory and ServiceNow, VOSS automated the provisioning of new meeting rooms, reducing setup time and minimizing the potential for human error. This not only improved efficiency but also ensured consistency across all meeting rooms globally.

unified communications management made simple with VOSS - happy employee on video meeting

Delivering value through UC optimization

For the customer, VOSS’s technology delivered significant value by addressing key pain points in their UC stack. The implementation of a single-pane-of-glass solution for monitoring and management enabled better visibility and control across their multi-vendor setup, while automated processes and proactive incident management enhanced operational efficiency and service reliability.

By partnering with VOSS, the customer was able to optimize their existing communications infrastructure, ensuring that both Cisco and Microsoft Teams environments were fully integrated, monitored, and managed effectively. This not only improved the end-user experience but also empowered their IT teams to deliver a more reliable and scalable communication service across their global operations.

In a world where effective communication is critical to business success, VOSS provided the tools and expertise needed to streamline and enhance the customer’s UC strategy, delivering a solution that was tailored to meet the demands of their complex, multi-vendor environment.

  • Find more information on VOSS on our website.

  • To discuss how VOSS can support your digital workplace needs, please get in touch here.

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Optimizing the New Hybrid Office with VOSS https://www.voss-solutions.com/blog/2024/optimizing-the-new-hybrid-office/ https://www.voss-solutions.com/blog/2024/optimizing-the-new-hybrid-office/#respond Thu, 11 Jan 2024 14:59:40 +0000 http://www.voss-solutions.com/?p=16154 Optimizing the New Hybrid Office Cisco and Microsoft collaborate to deliver exceptional meeting room experiences - Enhance the experience with VOSS Author: Tim Jalland Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions Thursday January 11, 2024 Are you planning for a return to the office in 2024? The [...]

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Optimizing the New Hybrid Office

Cisco and Microsoft collaborate to deliver exceptional meeting room experiences – Enhance the experience with VOSS

Author: Tim Jalland
Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions

Thursday January 11, 2024

Are you planning for a return to the office in 2024?

The holiday break is always a good time to reflect on what took place last year and what’s in store for 2024. Flexible working and investment in platforms such as Microsoft Teams are clearly here to stay. But what about the office in 2024? When it comes to your office layout, its purpose, its function, and your workforce’s experience, what are your plans?

There’s a trend for people to move back into the office, if only part time. Increasingly, time spent at the office is in meetings with colleagues. However, 98% of meetings now include remote participants and so this ‘hybrid’ meeting experience of in-the-office and out-of-the-office is increasingly important to productivity and business outcomes.

Supporting this, organizations are refurbishing and investing in quality meeting room equipment from vendors such as Cisco, Polycom, and Logitech, who continue to push audio and video boundaries. Analytics is becoming vital to ensure everything works seamlessly together.

On a broader topic, analytics around UC, usage, occupancy, and meeting performance are helping shape our decisions on office space reconfiguration, making more room for hot desking and drop-down zones, and introducing more huddle spaces and more expansive boardroom and classroom facilities.

Young woman having a meeting in a public area on a laptop - multi-vendor hybrid office meeting room experience

Creating a superior meeting room experience for everybody

Where to get started?

Many customers have invested in Microsoft Teams as their primary meeting application provider (43% – according to Metrigy) and this includes certification for meeting room hardware, offering choice from an approved range of vendors, and supporting meeting rooms of all shapes and sizes. You’ll find the link at the end of this blog!

The good news is that Cisco (working closely with Microsoft) also now has meeting room hardware certified (technically MTR certified). That means, whether it is through preference or choice, or you’re looking to get more out of existing Cisco meeting room investments, you can now bring these into your overall Teams meeting room experience with confidence. The best of both worlds!

Bringing it together with a single coherent solution

Those are the core building blocks – a collaboration platform such as Microsoft Teams, supporting a population of remote workers, with in-the-office workers joining meetings and collaborating through well-equipped meeting rooms. Simple on paper, complex in practice, where user expectations are high and IT managers are left with the disparate and basic tools provided by the vendors themselves – such as Microsoft’s Pro Portal and Cisco’s Webex Control Hub.

Larger estates particularly, with many meeting rooms, warrant an investment in suitable administration and analytics tools to deliver the right overall level of performance.

IT leaders often adopt management tools only after realizing that they need additional management capabilities beyond those provided by their software vendor(s). Among those using Microsoft Teams Meetings, just 16.8% say they’ve had video-quality issues, which they primarily attribute to a lack of adequate network services, including Wi-Fi, LAN, and WAN.

Source: Metrigy, Assuring Success for Microsoft Teams Rooms - Q1 2023

Next steps

Here are a few ideas on what should be on the checklist for such a toolset, along with a few screenshots from the VOSS toolset:

  • Single pane of glass: If your UC estate is spread over several locations and office sites, containing meeting room equipment from multiple vendors and connected into the Microsoft Teams meeting service, along with many remote works, it is critical to have a single viewpoint and point of control with data insights presented in a consistent and normalized way.
  • Automation with templates: There’s a need to deploy, reconfigure and often reset meeting room configurations, in a fast and standardized way, removing manual errors with automation and workflows. That might be in the rollout of a new office, or as is often the case, resetting a meeting room configuration after regular use has taken it off track and caused issues. There are a lot of configuration parameters around each meeting room type, and so templating this is critical.
  • Elevating service performance: Checking in on the many components that make up the meeting room service – including Microsoft Teams, meeting room equipment, connectivity, and networking – to ensure all is performing optimally. Whether attendees are in the office or remote, everybody has a good meeting experience; whether they’re collaborating with somebody next to them or to a remote participant. Some of this will be reactive and alert-based, some will be more automated and proactive, and some will monitor actual user experience. That level of visibility then needs to provide snapshot reports and also track and trend over time, monitoring and driving improvement.
  • Adoption and usage: There’s a huge amount of data generated from a UC system, and navigating through that in a timely way to really understand current performance, application usage, and how it is trending over time can be tricky – but the results are important and help align capability, capacity, and availability with business needs and budget.
  • Security and compliance: With the vast amount of configuration and usage data contained in IT systems, ensuring this is configured correctly – particularly on related Microsoft Policies – and used correctly is vital. Automation helps significantly with this, and analytics provides a lens into this activity.
  • Inventory and asset management: Keeping track of your UC assets across all locations is the foundation for success: What hardware is installed, which version of software is running, whether it is compliant or not. This also provides a mechanism for understanding meeting room requirements and matching equipment capabilities accordingly.
  • Office and room optimization: Where there’s information available from a building management system or the meeting room equipment itself, there’s the option to track and manage room occupancy, ensuring rooms are not overfull or empty, and resources are managed accordingly. This can lead to significant cost savings in equipment, licensing, and real estate itself.

What Next?

If you’re looking for the latest release details on VOSS solutions, please click here. If you’re looking for Microsoft Teams Rooms certified systems, click here. To learn more about how VOSS can help you optimize your meeting room experience, click here. You’ll find more details at the VOSS website, or get in contact here.

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