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.

More features brings more complexity and a need to change how we manage

As 2024 draws to a close, it is worth reflecting on the fact that Microsoft Teams has now been available for seven and a half years, having been launched worldwide on March 14, 2017. (This is either a short or long period of time depending on your perspective.)

Overall, each year with Microsoft Teams has seen more users, more features, more licenses, and more complexity.

Teams is Successful

Teams has certainly been successful, and provides many organizations with strong communication, collaboration, and workflow capabilities, as witnessed by…

• 320 million monthly active Teams users
• 20 million monthly active PSTN users
• 3 million Teams Premium users
• >1 million Teams Rooms

The Teams “universe” currently looks like this (as of October 2024):

320 million monthly active Teams users is indeed a big and impressive number.

However, despite a huge “push” from Microsoft, Teams Phone, as a replacement voice system (PBX), appears to be an underutilized capability, with only 6% of active Teams users taking advantage of this robust capability.

An additional 24 million users have unused licensing for Teams Phone via their E5 license. An estimated 60 million users in total are licensed for Teams Phone, 44 million as part of their E5 bundle and an estimated 16 million additional Teams Phone license purchases, most often as an add-on to an E3 license. Certainly, an opportunity in 2025 for organizations and Microsoft partners.

To get to the current state, Teams growth has been explosive, but is leveling off, granted at an impressively high level.

Teams is Powerful and Keeps Adding Features

Over the past years Teams has grown more powerful, with hundreds of features added each year.

2024 was no exception to this trend. Recently, Microsoft introduced a new chat and channels experience that was described by many as one of the biggest changes to Teams ever.

The new chat and channel experience works well, even with lots of channels it displays quickly and allows you to easily monitor unread messages. The numerous configuration options might be overwhelming to some users and different modes of displaying the same information can make helping a user more difficult; giving instructions on what to click on depend on their configuration choices.

At Microsoft Ignite (week of November 18, 2024) additional Teams features were announced:

• Multilingual meeting transcripts
• Translation for intelligent meeting recaps
• Microsoft Places which helps better manage hybrid work scenarios
• Storyline integration into Teams (previously part of Viva Engage)

Of course, lots of new Copilot features which extend Teams were also announced, including:

• The ability for Copilot to analyze content presented in Teams and reason over shared content
• Copilot will now give quick summaries for files shared in a Teams chat
• Copilot Pages which provides persistent results for prompt results from BizChat (aka Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat). Pages can be shared and co-authored.
• A Copilot Interpreter agent that provides real-time language translation during a meeting. Participants can choose to have the Interpreter simulate their own voice.
• A Copilot meeting Facilitator agent that will take real-time summary notes that can be co-authored with meeting participants
• An Employee Self-Service agent that can provide answers and take actions related to common HR and IT scenarios from within Teams BizChat

While the addition of new features to Teams is welcomed by power users, there is starting to be increasing “rumblings” from standard users related to the seemingly incessant UI changes Microsoft is making.

Administration and Support of Teams

With most new Teams features, options, or capabilities there is a need for a system admin to understand and configure who gets what option. Many options have security, compliance, data residency, and/or licensing implications.

New features also require that the Teams Admin Center (TAC) continues to evolve or additions to the PowerShell scripting language are needed. Keeping up with both options, as hundreds of new features are added, can be challenging for IT Pros.

With more complex configurations, and potentially many different sets of options for different user groups, diagnosing problems becomes more complex.

Licensing is Complex and Getting More Expensive

In the beginning Teams was included as part of Office 365 (and M365 licenses), now there are business and enterprise plans where Teams has been “unbundled” from Microsoft 365.

In addition, there are multiple add-ons to Teams, including Teams Premium ($7/user/month), Teams Phone (included with E5, otherwise $8+/user/month), Copilot ($30/user/month), and Teams Rooms Pro ($40/room/month).

A full enterprise plan comparison chart is available here.

Microsoft also recently announced that Teams Phone licenses will increase in cost in 2025, going from $8+/user/month to $10+/user/month. Monthly billing annual plans will all now have a 5% price increase (as compared to upfront paid annual plans).

Teams Management Options

Throughout 2024, I have had numerous discussions with many individuals at VOSS focused on their approach to simplifying some of the above noted challenges with Teams.

Here are some of my key takeaways from these discussions.

VOSS Automate is designed to simplify the administration of Teams, and also can provide a “single pane of glass” if you need to manage both Teams and other systems (e.g. Cisco). I’ve seen examples where VOSS:

• Insulates admins from needing to deal with finicky scripting
• Can be used to automate multiple systems and multi-step processes
• Allows you to delegate capabilities based on office location, or any other logical grouping
• Can present a simplified user interface, with limited options, to first-tier support workers
• Can help standardize sets of configuration options applied to users
• Provides a complete audit trail (and supports rollback in case a change has an unintended effect)

VOSS Insights extends the built-in Teams reporting to provide a unified view across multiple systems. I wrote recently that Teams reporting is improving but there are still gaps. Cost and license optimization is an area where organizations often use VOSS Insights.

Taming Teams

At the end of 2024, organizations looking to fully leverage Teams in 2025 need to:

1. Provide adequate initial and on-going training for end-users (This includes establishing a process for keeping up to date on new features and how these might be integrated to improve your business processes)
2. Analyze and optimize Teams and add-on licenses (Copilot, Teams Premium, Teams Room Pro)
3. Ensure IT has the time and inclination to keep up with management and configuration changes within Teams Admin Center and O365 Admin Center (This may involve considering third-party tools to simplify management and reporting)
4. Leverage built-in tools and reports (and potentially third-party tools) to monitor, manage, and operate your Teams environment efficiently and effectively

If you work for a large enterprise organization, do you have the same impression as me? In 2024 did you see Teams get more powerful, more complex, neither or both? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Microsoft has consistently worked to improve quality and usage reporting associated with Lync, then Skype for Business, then Skype Online, and now Teams. There have been significant advances over the past nine years, but gaps and opportunities for improvement remain. Let’s first acknowledge the significant advancements Microsoft has made. Then we can examine the current gaps and opportunities to improve.

The History

The Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) was originally released as a free add-on for Skype for Business Server, the on-premises version of Microsoft’s chat, meeting, and communications server.

In 2015 Microsoft released a version of CQD that worked with Skype for Business Online (the platform that would morph eventually into Teams).

In 2016 version 2.0 of CQD provided access to 6 months of data and expanded reporting beyond audio quality, including video and appsharing information.

The year 2017 brought further updates to CQD that added a reliability issue report focused on call setup issues. This was also the year Teams launched.

The combined Teams and Skype for Business admin center was launched in 2019 which also integrated the call quality dashboard (although it really was just a menu link to the CQD portal).

A significant number of CQD updates were launched in 2019 under the “Advanced CQD” banner. Call data was now updated within 30 minutes (labeled “near real-time data”) as opposed to taking over 24 hours. The ability to drill down within reports even to the user level was provided along with the addition of several near reports.

After years of improving CQD, Microsoft pivoted in 2020 bringing call quality data into Power BI (business intelligence) with the release of the first version of the Quality of Experience (QER) templates.

Current State

The latest version of the Power BI QER templates, version 8, are available here and a detailed listing of the various Power BI QER reports can be found here.

Recently Microsoft has deprecated the original CQD portal, adding a banner that directs users to use Power BI:

The current series of QER Power BI templates is packaged into five different templates, each with many reports:

• QER.pbit is the main template with over 20 reports focused on identifying Teams meeting and calling issues.
• QER MTR.pbit provides reports focused on Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• QER PS.pbit is a template optimized to analyze Microsoft Teams Phone System deployments.
• CQD Teams Auto Attendant & Call Queue Historical Report.pbit includes three reports related to auto attendant, call queue, and agent usage.
• CQD Teams Usage Report.pbit details how users in your organization are using Teams.

Current Gaps

Despite the significant number of changes and the large number of reports available through the admin center, the Teams admin center, and Power BI, there are several gaps between the current state and the ideal state:

1) Too much data too few insights

The goal of analytics is to provide actionable insights, that is, to highlight issues you can take corrective action to address. The current reports still too often provide interesting visuals that don’t point IT professionals towards specific issues.

2) Inability to compare groups

The ability to compare quality, reliability, usage, adoption, and user satisfaction across different geographical, functional, and facility groups is one of the most powerful mechanisms to identify potential issues. While some existing Teams reports allow you to group results based on IP address, they lack the ability to track “VIPs” or other functional groups.

3) Too many “good” calls

CQD uses a very specific formula to classify calls as “poor”. The rules are too rigid and often having multiple parameters near the threshold can cause users to indicate the call was poor, even though it is marked as good.

Specifically, CQD only marks a call as poor if one or more of the following conditions are met and Packet Utilization is > 500 packets:

4) Lacking a complete view

The CQD and Power BI reports do not have the ability to pull data from on-premises session border controllers (SBCs) or other network devices which means you have an incomplete view of what may be causing issues.[TJ1]

For organizations using Operator Connect or Direct Routing as a Service (DRaaS) this becomes even more challenging as they don’t have access to details that can help identify the likely source of an issue.

Filling the Gaps

I recently had a detailed discussion with representatives from VOSS that focused on how they  address the issues related to the built-in Teams reports for their customers.

I came away from our discussion, understanding that VOSS Insights was focused on addressing several significant Teams reporting limitations:

1) Focusing on actionable insights

According to VOSS, the name of its reporting product “Insights” speaks to the intent for the VOSS toolset to provide actionable intelligence into your complete UC estate.

Customized dashboards can readily compare different user groupings.

Customized dashboards can be complemented by intelligent alerting, the ability to group and summarize alerts as opposed to overwhelming IT pros wit a barrage of alerts during an incident.

Beyond providing actionable insights and alerting, in some cases the VOSS tools can initiate automated remedial action, known as self-healing. [TJ2] [KK3] This can reduce the burden on the operations team and help to resolve certain issues more quickly.

2) Delivering multi-platform reporting

While many organizations have standardized on Microsoft O365 and Teams, lots still use other UC&C platforms for specific use cases.

VOSS provides a “single pane of glass” even if you use multiple UC&C tools, so you can gain view and manage the full UC stack from a single point of control. Understandably, Microsoft reporting does not (and likely will not) provide this capability.

3) Providing a more complete “big picture”

VOSS Insights incorporates the traditional CQD data along with proactive synthetic testing data, detailed data from SBCs, and network layer data such as NetFlow to provide an in-depth insight into the UC stack, helping to ensure better UC observability.

This more complete picture can help shorten resolution time and reduce finger-pointing between teams (or providers).

4) Helping optimize cost

VOSS Insights can help analyze usage and optimize capacity and licensing data to ensure you are delivering communications and collaboration capabilities as cost-effectively as possible.

Additionally, by ingesting facility information, including power consumption data, customized Insights dashboards can assist in delivering better overall asset management.

Information is Key

The built-in Teams reports have certainly evolved, and no doubt will continue to improve.

However, the Microsoft approach often provides lots of reports all with an overwhelming amount of data and limited information.

Based on my discussions with VOSS, their toolset starts where the Microsoft reports end and focus on providing actionable insights. For those responsible for delivering consistent, reliable, cost-effective communications and collaboration, this combination is worth investigating.

References:

• VOSS site: https://www.voss-solutions.com/
• VOSS Insights product details: https://www.voss-solutions.com/offerings/voss-insights/
• CQD Stream Classification: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/stream-classification-in-call-quality-dashboard
• Power BI Quality of Experience Reporting: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cqd-power-bi-query-templates
• RFC 350: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3550

Microsoft Teams is only eight years old. Microsoft announced Teams at an event in New York on November 2, 2016, and Teams was officially launched on March 14, 2017.

In the past 8 years, Teams has grown tremendously, both in terms of active users and in terms of features.

For many organizations, the growth of their internal processes has not kept pace with Teams.

Teams User Growth

Since its introduction, Teams has seen consistent and sustained user growth.

Teams added 100 million daily active users in the one-year period from March 2020 to April 2021, driven by the pandemic forced shift to remote work.

User adoption of Teams over the past 5 years

Teams Feature Growth

In parallel with user growth, Teams has added hundreds of new features every year, both end-user features and admin features.

The pace of innovation for Teams is not slowing down. The current Microsoft 365 Roadmap shows 66 features for Teams in development, 55 new features rolling out, and 269 features launched in the past 12 months.

Microsoft Teams roadmap items

Maturing Your IT Processes

Perhaps the pandemic forced your organization to rapidly deploy and adopt Teams.

Likely Teams has performed well.

However, as Teams has matured, adding new features and capabilities, many IT orgs have not grown at the same rate. This provides you with an opportunity to streamline and deliver better service with less effort.

Below is a plan that will significantly improve your Teams operational maturity over the next 3 months.

In month one the plan focuses first on understanding tools that you can use to measure. As the saying goes, “you can’t manage what you can’t (or don’t) measure”. Next, in month two, we shift to more proactively detecting issues. Finally, in the third month, we discuss how to automate and ensure consistency for common administrative tasks.

Step 1: In the next 30 days — Leverage metrics

Familiarize yourself with the reports available in the Microsoft Admin Center and the Teams Admin Center.

Microsoft continues to add new reports and expand existing reports.

The Adoption Score report provides a wealth of information related to digital adoption, including a new section related to Copilot. Usage reports detail use of Teams, Exchange, OneDrive, Copilot for M365, Project, and many other office apps.

The Quality of Experience PowerBI templates provide useful visualizations of the Teams call quality data.

If you need more advanced reporting, including reporting that covers multiple UC platforms, or incorporates data from other sources such as room occupancy, energy usage, or other applications, you may want to investigate proven solutions such as VOSS Insights. Third-party solutions come at an additional cost, but for medium and large or complex organizations the more detailed insights often provide a strong return on investment.

Step 2: In the next 60 days — Become proactive

Looking at historical reports helps you plan for the future.

In the second month, shift your attention to proactively anticipating and reacting ahead of issues. This can be done by implementing synthetic transactions, often referred to as providing proactive monitoring. Synthetic transactions simulate user actions: signing into M365, sending a chat message, making a call, joining a meeting, etc.

Teams Premium, an additional cost license for Teams users, adds some ability to monitor and alert on real-time issues. Real-time analytics allows IT admins to see audio, video, content sharing, and network-related issues for their most important users (aka those users who have paid for a Teams Premium license). The challenge is that detecting an issue during a meeting or call is often too late. While you can detect in real time, it is almost impossible to react or correct in real time.

Proactive monitoring, provided by third-party tools, such as VOSS Insights, continuously simulates Teams user activity and can alert IT staff often before any actual user has encountered an issue. These proactive alerts might indicate a specific location has network issues or a specific Microsoft service is unavailable in a certain geographies. Proactive alerts allow the IT team to have an early warning of possible and actual issues. This allows the IT team to start investigating, take corrective actions, or provide notices including workarounds to users, often before the user business process is negatively impacted.

Step 3: In the next 90 days — Streamline and automate

In the third month of your growth plan, the focus shifts to streamlining and automating administration of your Teams environment.

Moves, adds, changes, and deletes, often referred to as MACDs, are a key part of Teams administration.

Rates vary by country, industry, and year, but it is common to see a 20% employee turnover rate. This means that in an organization with 5,000 employees, IT administrators need to offboard 1,000 users per year, add 1,000 users per year, to replace the positions, and likely more if your organization is growing.

Beyond the adds and deletes, typically a similar number of changes, as employees switch roles or as new options and permissions are added to Teams, mean thousands of additional administrative tasks.

The Teams Admin Center (TAC) provides a graphical user interface to make individual changes. It is cumbersome and time consuming when making hundreds or thousands of changes. (Consider that many larger organizations provide excellent summer co-op/intern programs requiring adding hundreds of users at the start of summer and removing the same hundreds of users at the end of each summer.)

PowerShell scripting can help deal with batches of changes; however, PowerShell requires experience not available within many IT teams and the scripted changes are not necessarily tracked, which means if something goes wrong it can be difficult to rollback.

I mentioned VOSS for analytics, but VOSS also provides automation via VOSS Automate. VOSS Automate can handle batches of changes (MACDs) in a consistent manner using templates based on location, role, and other attributes. An automated tool also ensures all changes are auditable, in case a change has an undesired impact. This includes supporting instant rollback if something goes wrong. And for organizations with multiple UC platforms, unlike Microsoft-focused tools, VOSS Automate supports Teams but also Cisco, Avaya, Zoom, and other platforms.

Streamlining Teams administration can often be achieved by delegating administration to local IT personnel. The challenge with Teams is that “global” rights are indeed global. Third-party tools solve this issue by being able to segregate admin rights based on location (often office or country). VOSS Automate allows segregation of administration in relation to both communications and security settings. An IT Pro in one office or region can be allowed to administer settings only for users in that office or region; this is something that Microsoft admin tools cannot do.

Final Thoughts

Teams continues to grow both its user base and its features. As an IT leader, you need to keep pace.

1. Leverage existing Admin Center and Teams Admin Center reports, or for more advanced capabilities investigate a more advanced reporting tool such as VOSS Insights.
2. Proactive, full-stack monitoring helps you identify issues before they impact your users. Teams Premium licenses provide some alerting capabilities, third-party tools currently have broader features.
3. Because change is a constant, along with adds, and deletes, the ability to distribute, automate, and audit can significantly reduce the IT admin burden. Third-party tools such as VOSS Automate are worth investigating.

Read the article on LinkedIn

More information

There’s more information on VOSS for migration on our website. You can also get in touch with us here.

(Article originally posted on LinkedIn)

Microsoft Teams provides meeting and collaboration capabilities for 320 million monthly active users. Teams provides telephony services for over 20 million users, up almost 30% year-over-year.

Teams helps millions of business users be more efficient and effective, except when it doesn’t.

To be fair, many of the issues users have with Teams are not related to Teams. The overall user experience with Teams is impacted by the user’s laptop (memory, processor, other applications), the audio/video devices being used (certified vs non-certified), and the network (corporate and especially home WiFi/internet).

Teams is solid except when it “leaks”. When Teams leaks IT professionals are responsible for determining why and fixing the leak.

Old-fashioned techniques: Dowsing

So, how do you find the source of the leak? How do you find the problem?

Finding water has been associated with many methods over the years. Similarly detecting issues with Teams has a long history of techniques.

Dowsing to find water, often referred to as water witching or divining, is an ancient practice where individuals use a dowsing rod, typically a forked stick, to locate underground water sources.

The dowser holds the stick by its two prongs and walks over the land; when the stick dips, twitches, or exhibits any unusual behavior, it is believed to indicate the presence of water below. The method relies on the dowser’s sensitivity to environmental cues or unseen forces, which supposedly guide the movement of the rod. Despite its long history and anecdotal reports of success, dowsing lacks scientific validation and remains a controversial and largely unexplained phenomenon.

Some approaches to monitor and troubleshoot Teams can seem equally archaic as using a stick to find water.

As Teams has evolved from OCS, to Lync, to Skype for Business, some IT Pros continue to use tools that worked alright when voice and collaboration workloads were hosted on-prem but fail to provide visibility into the cloud-based, distributed environment of Teams.

New fashioned techniques: Full-stack Observability

Sure, you might get lucky and find water using a y-shaped stick.

You may also get lucky and be able to find the source of a Teams issue using the Teams Admin Center or other non-Teams specific network tools.

In both cases, you are relying on luck. The science for finding water and finding “leaks” or issues with Teams has improved greatly over the past several years.

Today, geophysicists may use surface magnetic resonance (SMR) imaging to scan the underground and map pockets of groundwater. SMR is a cost-effective, non-invasive, and powerful ground-based geophysical technique used to detect and measure groundwater compared to traditional drilling. Think of it as an x-ray for the ground.

Today, Teams administrators can use full-stack observability tools to cost-effectively identify the source of reported Teams issues and often pro-actively remediate potential issues before they become user impacting.

Full-stack observability enables the monitoring of every component in a distributed IT environment through telemetry data. It provides a real-time view of each component’s status, centralizing various outputs for a comprehensive perspective across on-premises, cloud, or hybrid setups. Full-stack observability allows for a complete understanding of system activities by analyzing the telemetry from all system parts. This becomes especially valuable as more workers operate in a hybrid mode, sometimes working from home and sometimes working in an office.

Unfortunately, both a pseudo-scientific dowsing stick and many Teams monitoring tools only look at the surface.

By monitoring all the solution parts, from the hardware up to the Teams application, a tool can provide insight into what component(s) caused an issue. Further, on-going synthetic transactions that simulate user activities can identify issues often before they have an end-impact impact.

This understanding is what led VOSS to expand its proven VOSS Insights toolset to provide full-stack monitoring.

The VOSS full-stack observability (FSO) solution seeks to:

• Offer a dynamic unified perspective across the entire UC network
• Analyze and enhance user experience and adoption rates
• Monitor and evaluate service availability in accordance with agreed SLAs
• Drastically reduce the time required to pinpoint and rectify issues
• Supply actionable business analytics and insights
• Streamline complexity, minimize ownership costs, and alleviate resource strain

VOSS Insights allows you to investigate telemetry from all the components that make up your UC Solution, even if you happen, like many large organizations, to use multiple UC platforms.

Upgrading Your Tools

With more users relying on Teams for both internal and external communications when they are in the office, working from home, or traveling, IT Pros who can proactively monitor and diagnose problems with Teams can find a “leak” before it becomes a “flood”, potentially overwhelming your support desk and eroding user confidence in Teams.

If you are still relying on monitoring and analytic tools from years ago, it’s time to toss your “dowsing stick” on the fire, roast some marshmallows, and then equip yourself and your team with modern and proven tools.

Managing the mix

Inevitably in these scenarios, there is a mix of vendors, technologies, and operator services under management. This project was no exception. It included the existing Cisco PBX (several clusters), Microsoft Teams Phone, Microsoft calling plans, Teams Phone Mobile, Operator Connect, and two operators providing PSTN access.

Managing the mix is taken care of by VOSS Automate in a single portal, providing a consistent view across the multitude of users, services, and numbers. Below you will see this at a site level, showing users with their devices and services, split across the existing PBX system and Microsoft Teams Phone.

The sheer scale

Next, we turned to the question of how to manage the scale of the solution, along with the number of administrators able to manage the service that were dispersed across various agencies and departments. The answer was to make use of the existing multi-node administration solution, hosted in different physical locations. This provided sufficient compute power along with a robustness should a particular location go offline.

Extending the solution to bring in Microsoft Teams Phone proved cost efficient, and the introduction was fast. The hierarchy concept described earlier provided a way to segment, filter, and navigate the vast number of users. Enhancements on existing workflows to cater for Microsoft Teams helped minimize training to the existing service agents who were managing the service.

Managing the two system syndrome

Managing an existing PBX system, which is multi-cluster and has a significant base of users and services, and then picking out departments to move on a schedule, is no mean feat. The crux point comes mid-migration, with users on both sides: Those waiting to migrate, and those migrated. Both systems need managing, operating, handling moves, adds, and changes.

The critical points on the solution were to:

• Run a discovery at the start of the migration project, to ensure there was good visibility into the existing PBX configuration, with the opportunity to clean up and trim back old configuration, thus streamlining the process and reducing license costs.
• Take advantage of the single portal view that straddles both sides, to provide a unified view of all users within the migration process. That was then coupled with migration ‘workflows’ that could move a user from Cisco to Microsoft Teams Phone.
• Regular synchronization with the underlying UC applications. In this case, Cisco and Microsoft Teams, to ensure that all information presented was accurate and up-to-date.
• Tracking telephone number inventory, what’s available and what’s used, who telephone numbers are allocated to, and what vendor system they reside on. Here is a sample screen shot from the VOSS Automate number inventory option, showing this:

More information

Carrying out a project of this scale is exactly what VOSS technology is built for. It’s exciting to solve a customer’s problems at such a grand scale, and we look forward to seeing the advancements that this dynamic UC platform takes in the coming years.

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