VOSS Discover: Do You Know What’s in Your PBX?
Understanding what is inside your existing PBX and what is worth moving is the first step towards a successful migration to Microsoft Teams or Cisco Webex
Author: Tim Jalland
Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions
Wednesday March 6, 2024
We are regularly asked how to begin a successful migration project to Microsoft Teams Phone. The answer is that you must start at the beginning, with the existing PBX, and follow a process that we call VOSS Discover. Read on …
PBX Discovery: A necessary first-step towards a successful migration to Microsoft Teams Phone
Adding enterprise telephony to cloud collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex is an agenda item for most of our customers. A single desktop client for chat, meetings and now voice offers increased productivity and is aligned with a general IT strategy of moving to the cloud. Additionally, it offers significant cost savings on PBX hardware, licensing, and support costs.
But where to start?
PBX systems are notoriously difficult to figure out, having been configured by successive technical experts over many years. So just how do you create a suitable telephony capability in the cloud without first understanding what’s in use currently and how that might be updated and moved? This first discovery step is critical to any successful migration project, to know where you are starting from. This process must:
- Meet user needs and expectations
- Run to planned costs and timescales
- Avoid surprises and unnecessary risks
- Go into production without myriad post migration support issues
VOSS Discover: Planning for success
At VOSS, we run discovery projects that are geared towards providing information from the existing PBX, to create a solid foundation for the migration plan. It’s a project run by VOSS that removes the blindfolds on the current configuration, and helps with feature mapping and planning for the migration journey.
Each project provides the following:
- Discovery on the PBX set-up, including users, devices, services, and numbers
- Analysis on features, identifying the equivalent on Microsoft Teams
- A usage review to trim licensing and unnecessary configuration clutter
- Guidelines on how to transfer the dial plan to the Microsoft tenant
- Considerations to bear in mind when building a migration plan
Each VOSS Discover project is delivered by a team of VOSS engineers with a track record in PBX systems and complex migration projects. They’re supported by VOSS Migrate automation tooling that streamlines the entire audit process.
The process itself is non-intrusive and secure, with the analysis conducted on an offline export of the PBX – no need to connect to the live PBX. This reduces the call on your technical and IT resources, freeing these up for higher priority projects and tasks. First results are available in a matter of weeks, to assist with early planning, budgeting, and resourcing.
What to Expect
Each VOSS discovery project provides 5 things:
- A Migration Readiness Report based on data extracted and covering PBX configuration, inventory, and migration ‘gap’ traffic-light analysis
- A Line Usage Report indicating numbers in use or those that can be trimmed to reduce clutter and costs as part of migration planning
- Best practice and advice on approaching migration planning based on experience from recent projects
- A two-hour workshop to review findings
- Support for ad-hoc queries resulting from the review and/or specific business questions
I’ve included two sample reports for your reference:
Two sample reports for migration readiness
Detailed PBX inventory
Potential migration issues
Getting started
VOSS will work with you to create a discovery strategy to suit your needs. We will ask you to provide four key things:
- A stakeholder for the process – This is required to oversee and own the process from the customer side
- An export from the existing PBX for us to work on – Produce an export from the existing PBX along with any other reports such as call CDRs/reports and number ranges
- Access to personnel during the assessment – During the planning workshop, we will require attendance of stakeholders, telephony, cloud, and infrastructure teams
- A completed questionnaire – Contains questions about the environment, plans, requirements, and infrastructure
There’s more information on VOSS Discover on our website. You can also get in touch with us here.
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