For organizations already investing in E5, the new tier offers a relatively small price increase to unlock a powerful layer of AI-driven productivity. For the right employees, that’s a compelling proposition. But the real opportunity isn’t simply upgrading everyone to E7. It’s making smarter decisions about who actually needs it.

E5 already delivers a comprehensive enterprise platform across Microsoft 365, including advanced security, compliance, and analytics capabilities through services such as Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. E7 builds on that foundation by introducing a deeper AI productivity layer.

Through Microsoft Copilot, AI assistance is embedded directly into everyday tools like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Instead of switching between tools or manually searching for information, employees can use AI to summarize meetings, draft documents, analyze data, generate insights, and automate repetitive work. The result is a more productive digital workplace where routine tasks are accelerated, and employees can focus on higher-value work.

Table from TrustedTech

While the new license introduces impressive capabilities, it won’t deliver the same value to every employee. AI productivity tools have the biggest impact for knowledge workers who spend much of their time creating content, analyzing information, and collaborating across teams. This typically includes roles such as executives, project managers, consultants, analysts, marketing professionals, and developers. For these employees, tools like Copilot can dramatically reduce time spent on manual tasks and help speed up research, decision-making, and content creation.

However, many employees simply don’t require that level of functionality. Frontline staff, operational roles, or employees who rarely create documents or presentations may see far less benefit from an E7 license. Rolling out E7 across the entire workforce could therefore drive up licensing costs without delivering proportional productivity gains. A more effective strategy is precision licensing—ensuring employees who can benefit from AI receive the right tools, while others remain on the most appropriate tier.

As Microsoft continues to expand its AI offerings, license management is becoming significantly more complex.

Organizations need clear visibility into how licenses are being used, which capabilities employees rely on, and where there may be opportunities to optimize. Without this insight, businesses risk overspending on premium licenses that deliver limited value, while other employees may be missing tools that could meaningfully improve their productivity.

In an AI-driven workplace, license decisions need to be informed by real usage data rather than guesswork.

The VOSS platform helps enterprises manage Microsoft environments with far greater visibility and control.

VOSS enables optimization and usage tracking. Our customers gain detailed insight into how Microsoft licenses and features are being used across the business. This makes it easier to identify underutilized licenses, reassign them where needed, and ensure high-value tools like E7 are allocated to the users who will benefit most.

VOSS introduces stronger governance and control. Policy-driven administration allows our customers to define clear rules around assigning and delegating licenses, preventing uncontrolled license sprawl while maintaining consistent standards across departments and regions.

VOSS provides monitoring and alerts for licensing changes. Microsoft licensing evolves quickly, with new bundles, updates, and occasional deprecations. VOSS monitors these changes, and alerts administrators when action may be required, helping organizations maintain an optimized and future-ready licensing environment.

The introduction of Microsoft 365 E7 highlights Microsoft’s commitment to embedding AI across the digital workplace. For employees who can fully leverage tools like Copilot, the potential productivity gains are substantial. But the real value comes from deploying those capabilities intelligently.

Organizations that combine powerful licenses like E7 with data-driven license management will see the greatest return – empowering the employees who need AI most while maintaining control over licensing costs across the wider workforce.

If you would like to discuss your Microsoft usage in more detail, please get in touch.

As reliance increases, so does the importance of ensuring that Teams Calling delivers a consistent, high-quality user experience. When voice quality degrades or calls fail, the impact is immediate and tangible – disrupting conversations, delaying decisions, and ultimately affecting productivity, customer satisfaction, and revenue.

However, Teams Calling does not operate in isolation. It depends on a chain of interconnected components, including:

• The user’s device and peripherals
• Local network and Wi-Fi conditions
• Corporate infrastructure and connectivity
• Microsoft 365 and Teams cloud services
• PSTN connectivity and carrier infrastructure

Each link in this chain must perform correctly. When one element fails or underperforms, the user experiences poor call quality – and identifying the root cause can be complex.

When call quality issues occur, the most visible symptom is a support ticket. These tickets often require multiple diagnostic steps, cross-team collaboration, and specialist expertise to resolve. This consumes valuable IT resources and increases operational costs, but the true impact extends further.

Many users never report issues at all. Instead, they adapt – tolerating degraded service, avoiding calls, or switching to alternative communication methods. This “silent suffering” creates hidden productivity losses across the organization.

Industry experience suggests that unreported issues may outnumber reported tickets by a factor of five to ten. This means the visible support burden represents only a fraction of the true operational and business impact.

Organizations typically address Teams Calling quality through a progression of operational maturity.

Top level quality indicators on a Microsoft Teams Phone service

Proactive monitoring agents in action, illustrating tests running along with key quality metrics over time

While the operational benefits of proactive monitoring are clear, many organizations struggle to quantify the financial impact. How much do Teams Calling issues really cost? And what is the measurable return on investing in proactive monitoring?

To answer this, Kevin Kieller of enableUC – a recognized Microsoft Teams expert with extensive customer experience – developed the Trouble Ticket Tamer model. This model quantifies the true cost of Teams Calling issues across three key dimensions:

• Lost productivity from affected users
• Lost revenue from disrupted customer interactions
• Additional IT labor required to diagnose and resolve issues

The model compares scenarios with and without proactive monitoring, revealing the potential cost savings and operational efficiency gains.

The calculator allows you to enter key parameters specific to your organization, such as:

• Number of Teams Calling users
• Support ticket volumes
• IT labor costs
• Revenue per employee

Based on these four inputs, the tool estimates the true annual cost of Teams Calling issues, the hidden cost of unreported problems, and the operational savings achievable through proactive monitoring. For many organizations, the results reveal substantial hidden costs – and a compelling financial justification for improving monitoring maturity.

As Microsoft Teams becomes the primary voice platform for modern enterprises, maintaining call quality is no longer simply a technical concern – it is a business imperative. Organizations that rely solely on reactive troubleshooting incur hidden costs in productivity, support overhead, and lost business opportunity. By adopting proactive monitoring, enterprises can transform Teams Calling operations — improving reliability, reducing support burden, and protecting business performance.

The Trouble Ticket Tamer provides a clear, data-driven way to understand this impact and build a strong business case for proactive monitoring.

Explore the Trouble Ticket Tamer calculator to understand the potential impact in your organization, or speak to VOSS to learn how proactive monitoring and analytics can help you deliver a reliable, high-quality Microsoft Teams Calling experience at scale.

Across our partner ecosystem, we are seeing a renewed strategic focus on voice – not as a legacy channel, but as an intelligent interface. Industry analysts and technology leaders are increasingly pointing to AI-powered voice as becoming a way to improve how companies engage with customers. With AI becoming mainstream in businesses, voice calls aren’t just conversations anymore – they can be analyzed, tracked, and even automated.

Major platform vendors are starting to embed real-time conversational AI into CRM, CX, and collaboration environments. AI can now transcribe, interpret, summarize, route, analyze sentiment, trigger workflows, and even resolve queries autonomously – all within the context of a live voice interaction.

The contact center is the first environment where this transformation is scaling reliably. It is where:

• AI handles routine queries
• Agents are augmented with real-time prompts and summaries
• Conversations feed analytics engines
• Voice data triggers downstream workflows in CRM and marketing systems

Customer engagement strategies are increasingly voice-led again – not because digital failed, but because AI has made voice measurable, automatable, and deeply data-rich.

But there is a critical dependency that often gets overlooked. None of this works without high-quality voice.

If voice is becoming the backbone of AI-driven engagement, then voice quality becomes a strategic asset. Poor call quality does not just frustrate customers and agents. It corrupts the data layer that AI depends on:

• Transcriptions degrade with jitter and packet loss
• Sentiment models misinterpret distorted audio
• Automation triggers misfire
• Compliance monitoring becomes unreliable

As organizations push toward AI-powered CX, they must ensure the underlying voice infrastructure – from SBCs to collaboration platforms to agent endpoints – delivers consistent, high-quality performance. This is where operational discipline meets AI ambition.

When I talk to my customers about cloud voice transformations, the conversation often focuses on features, architecture, or migration tooling. But the real story – the story that determines whether an organization succeeds or falters – is about execution at scale. It’s about whether thousands of employees can arrive at work the next day and continue business as usual, completely unaware that anything changed.

That’s why one recent global migration stands out for me, that I’d like to tell you about.

Late last year, a large enterprise transitioned nearly 60,000 users to Microsoft Teams Phone in under 7 months, spanning APAC, EMEA, LATAM, and North America – with zero business disruption. Even in an industry where complexity is expected, this project presented complexity at scale. The outcome wasn’t just about operational excellence; the project delivered more than $2M USD in cost savings, proving that transformation done right can accelerate value, not just reduce risk.

The more I reflect on the project, it’s clear that the real lesson here isn’t just in the numbers. It’s how they were achieved.

On paper, moving from one voice platform to another sounds like a purely technical task. In reality, global migrations require:

• Coordinating distributed environments with regional regulatory requirements
• Aligning multiple stakeholders – including service providers, partners, and customer teams
• Executing all cutovers outside business hours to ensure uninterrupted operations
• Maintaining design consistency across multiple continents, languages, and working practices
• Managing intricate voice routing, gateways, and overlapping legacy infrastructure

Large organizations rarely have a single “migration team.” They typically have many teams – network, voice, operations, project management, security, regional IT – each with different priorities and constraints. Success depends on unifying them.

This project succeeded not because it was simple, but because every element of delivery was engineered to eliminate risk.  This is the VOSS operating model:

For further details, read the case study.
If you would like to discuss your next migration project, please get in touch.

Organizations run on meetings. Many, many meetings. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index time spent in meetings increased by 200% through 2020. Ask anyone and back-to-back-to-back meetings are not only common but expected.

With people returning to the office, at least part time, an increasing number of these many meetings include people both in a meeting room and remote. According to the Cisco Global Workplace Survey, 98% of meetings will include at least one remote participant.

To better accommodate both in-office and remote participants, organizations are updating meeting rooms and many of these organizations are choosing Microsoft Teams Rooms for new meeting spaces.

With 300 million monthly active Teams users, it is not surprising that last year Cisco announced several of their devices were being certified for Microsoft Teams Room.

Cisco Devices for Microsoft Teams

Cisco now offers certified Teams devices for all sizes of meeting rooms. Cisco has a reputation for delivering some of the highest quality video devices, often described as embodying “Scandifornian” design (combining Nordic simplicity with California fun) by Snorre Kjesbu, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Cisco Collaboration Devices.

Room Bar (left) and Room Bar Pro (right)

The Cisco Room Bar and Room Bar Pro provide high-quality video conferencing and content sharing for huddle rooms and medium-sized spaces respectively.

Room Kit EQ (left) Room Kit Pro (right)

The Room Kit EQ provides support for large meeting rooms while the Room Kit Pro device bundle has been designed for the largest spaces and for specialist AV scenarios.

Board Pro

If you want to be more collaborative, the Board Pro provides a video conferencing and co-creation device that is designed specifically for hybrid meetings in small or medium-sized spaces. The Board Pro can be wall mounted, equipped with a floor stand, or connected to a durable wheel-stand to enhance its portability.

Mixed Meeting Rooms

As device capabilities improve, most larger organizations are continually in a multi-year process of upgrading meeting spaces. This translates to the need to support many different meeting room devices, often from multiple vendors.

Individual vendors focus on providing management tools for their devices:

• Microsoft Teams Room Pro Management Portal
• Cisco Webex Control Hub
• Poly Lens
• Logitech Sync
• Zoom Rooms Admin Management

While each of these vendor-specific solutions works well, the reality is that most organizations need to support a multi-vendor UC and room environment.

A True Multi-Vendor Meeting Room Management Solution

VOSS has long been known for providing multi-vendor migration, management, monitoring, and analytic tools to simplify and accelerate multi-vendor UC deployments.

Now VOSS extends those capabilities into the meeting room, helping large organizations manage and monitor all their meeting rooms from a “single pane of glass”, in other words, a consolidated control application.

VOSS Automate allows you to automate room deployments and updates regardless of vendor. VOSS Insights provides monitoring, alerting, and analytics across all your meeting room devices.

A global overview of all meeting room devices

Beyond Basic Room Management

Meeting rooms are important, but they are only part of an effective communication and collaboration solution.

VOSS Insights can report on remote, in-person, and hybrid meetings regardless of the room or device being used, along with UC calls.

Meeting and call stats

Additionally, data from building management systems or other applications can be combined with meeting room data to provide unique insights such as:

• Comparative quality across meeting room devices from multiple vendors
• Occupancy and power usage data aligned with meeting room device usage
• Service desk tickets attributable to each device and/or room configuration

Power consumption and cost per sq ft meeting room stats

More Choice = Better Solutions

It is exciting to see Cisco with some of the best-in-class devices embrace the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. Having more choice means organizations are better able to optimize their meeting room experience, increasingly important in this on-going era of hybrid work.

The VOSS toolset makes it possible to choose components from multiple vendors without adding management burden and without losing any data driven insights.

To learn more about VOSS for Microsoft, please click here, or to get in touch with VOSS, please click here. To learn more about the author, Kevin Kieller, please click here.