In today’s cloud-first world, Microsoft licensing has become increasingly complex. Enterprises are no longer just buying base license subscriptions such as an E1 or E5; they are navigating a growing array of add-ons, Copilot features, and consumption-based services. With more than $8 billion spent on Microsoft licensing every month, organizations can’t afford to treat license management as purely an administrative exercise.

Yet many companies still rely on the information in the M365 Admin Center – that provides only high-level information on overall license capacity by SKU and consumption. The result? Over-purchasing, mismatched license types, underutilized services, and a lack of agility to respond to changing business needs.

The real opportunity lies not just in controlling costs, but in using license intelligence to drive agility. When you understand how your licenses are used, you can pivot quickly – scaling services, enabling new regions, merging teams, or rolling out new capabilities with confidence.

Moving beyond simple license counts, enterprises are now looking at license performance: how each license contributes to user experience, productivity, and overall business outcomes. This shift requires a new level of visibility and governance, including:

• Allocation controls – Track license positions with granular visibility and alerts to prevent resource starvation.
• Department-level granularity – Manage local requirements while maintaining enterprise-wide oversight.
• Automation – Streamline onboarding and offboarding with standard license templates.
• Analytics – Track adoption, usage, and value across departments to maximize ROI.
• Monitoring and optimization – Identify duplicate, unused, or incorrectly assigned licenses, rationalize applications, and improve productivity.
• Smarter purchasing – Forecast, budget, and plan license requirements at an individual, departmental, or organizational level.

VOSS provides a centralized platform for proactive license governance and planning. Its tooling gives you real-time insights across Microsoft environments, helping IT teams:

Reallocate licenses quickly during organizational changes

Identify underutilized licenses and optimize usage

Rationalize applications and reduce unnecessary costs

Forecast and plan license needs with confidence

With VOSS, you gain the visibility and control needed to turn license management from a complicated task into a strategic enabler. This approach allows you to be agile, responsive, and ready to scale services as business priorities shift.

To harness the full value of Microsoft licensing, I recommend you start with an audit and review of your current position, then invest in tooling and processes that make license management sustainable over the long term. By moving from reactive administration to proactive governance, you can unlock both cost savings and operational agility. Please get in touch to discuss your license concerns.

Microsoft Teams boasts over 320 million active users, yet only 20 million use telephony. Contrast that with the fact that many organizations are still operating on premise telephony (PBX) systems, with a desire to migrate these systems to the cloud, and you can see why there is a pent-up demand for a fast, accurate, and efficient way to facilitate this transition.

One common question we are often asked is how to approach this migration in a way that:

• Maintains the user experience
• Addresses their detailed needs
• Avoids transferring unwanted configurations, and
• Ensures minimal disruption while remaining cost-effective

The answer is bulk automation.

When migrating large groups – for example site-based or regional batches of 5,000 to 15,000 users – a common approach is PowerShell scripting. This method uses a “.TXT/.CSV” input file or similar, containing a list of users and migration details alongside a set of PowerShell commands, all initiated on a local Windows server. While effective in some cases, this comes with significant drawbacks:

• Requires highly skilled Microsoft specialists to execute
• Creates security risks due to elevated permissions on the Microsoft tenant
• Is error prone, due to the number of manual steps involved
• Provides limited logging for audits and diagnostics, and
• Offers minimal feedback during the migration process, making it difficult to monitor progress.

Alternatively, organizations invest in automation, such as bespoke tools or self-built tools around Microsoft Power Automate. This takes time and requires both specialist skills and ongoing support. Importantly, with this method, each user is handled as a single thread, perhaps taking a much as two minutes per user migration. Suddenly a 5,000-user batch migration becomes a 7-day (or more!) marathon … and that’s assuming non-stop processing each day with no errors or dropouts along the way.

Bulk automation provides the answer for migrating large batches of users efficiently and seamlessly. Here’s how the process works, and some key considerations when choosing an automated migration tool:

1. Automated data extraction: Information is extracted from the existing PBX for review
2. Configuration optimization: Usage data is applied to identify and remove unnecessary configurations
3. Batch selection: Users are filtered and selected as part of the migration batch
4. Configuration mapping: Data is mapped from the legacy system (e.g., Cisco) to Microsoft Teams Phone, with non-mappable features flagged for review
5. Controlled loading: The full batch is transferred to Microsoft Teams as an entity, then split into smaller chunks (e.g., 100 users per chunk) for finer control, loading and immediate feedback on the process
6. Respectful migration: Each chunk is processed systematically, including licensing, telephone numbers, voice configurations, and policies. Backoff algorithms prevent tenant overload, while token credentials are refreshed automatically, and retries are initiated during network congestion or failures
7. Comprehensive logging: Every step is logged into an audit trail, ensuring a complete record and identifying errors for correction and replay

At VOSS, we leverage VOSS Migrate to fully automate the steps outlined above, delivering fast, accurate, and efficient migrations without burdening your IT team. What’s more, VOSS Migrate includes an intuitive portal that makes this whole process straightforward and even, dare I say it, enjoyable.

The result? Each user migration typically takes seconds – a significant improvement over the two-minute-per-user timeframe highlighted earlier, and with no errors.

If you’d like to learn more about VOSS, VOSS Migrate, or how to run large-scale migrations to Microsoft Teams Phone, please contact us.

(Article originally posted on LinkedIn)

There have been many different Star Trek series since the original series from 1966 (coincidentally the year I was born). According to Copilot, there are 12 Star Trek television series that created 905 episodes across 47 seasons of television; although I would always double-check the AI math. In any event, there are lots of Star Trek episodes.

Right now I am watching episodes of Discovery. Discovery begins a decade before the original Star Trek which was set in the 23rd century. At the end of the second season of Discovery, they travel to the 32nd century which is the setting for subsequent seasons.

Teams Phone has also had lots of series: LCS (although admittedly without real phone features), OCS, OCS R2 (where Microsoft really provided a PBX for the first time), Lync, Skype for Business, and then Teams (and now the new Teams client).

Like Star Trek, with different series, Microsoft voice, with its different versions, has seen ups and downs.

For organizations that have decided to boldly go where many have gone before (active Teams Phone usage is up to 20 million users) it turns out that discovery is hard.

In the Star Trek series Discovery the crew is inevitably confronted by some unique astrophysical phenomenon that can’t be scanned. It turns out that nebulas, dense asteroid fields, and subspace anomalies can all disrupt or block long-range sensors.

Many organizations planning to migrate to Teams underestimate the challenge of understanding (scanning) and migrating legacy PBX configurations to Teams.

Legacy PBXs often have been deployed for years, sometimes tens of years. Over this time the configuration has evolved and changed with the organization. Perhaps the staff that initially installed some of the PBXs is no longer available. A lack of insight into the existing PBX set-up introduces risk, unnecessary cost, user disappointment, and support issues into the migration project.

While it is possible to manually canvas subject matter experts within your organization and manually extract configuration information from legacy PBXs, this is a time-consuming process. Even when complete, there is a need to consolidate and map current configurations to a new Teams Phone configuration, and this is often not a direct 1-to-1 mapping.

Fortunately there are tools that make this process easier. One such tool is VOSS Discover.

Boosting Power to Long-range Sensors

In many Discovery episodes the captain asks something such as “can we compensate for the distortion or boost power to long-range sensors?”. Of course, when you need long-range sensors you need them quickly. VOSS Discover is like a boost of power and automates the collection of key data from legacy PBXs. Automation helps you complete your “scan” before you get sucked into a space-time, or project, anomaly.

VOSS Discover is a set of tools supported by engineering expertise focused on boosting power for three specific outcomes:

1. Understanding your existing PBX configuration and inventory detail.
2. Using usage data to be able to optimize users, devices, and numbers that need to be migrated saving both time and money.
3. Creating a migration mapping that helps understand how to move features from where you are to Microsoft Teams, including highlighting specific feature mappings that may pose problems.

Non-disruptive Data Extraction

The VOSS Discover tool allows you to extract data from your existing PBXs, audit, analyze, and normalize this data.

What I learned from Star Trek: Discovery is that inevitably something happens to take your engines (their spore drive) offline. It could be a subspace rift, or any number of unique astrophysical phenomena. Interacting with production systems carries some risk.

This is why I like the approach of VOSS Discover that relies on backups or configuration exports from existing PBXs. This is a non-disruptive, secure process that does not connect to or interfere with any live running voice services. Cisco, Avaya, and Skype for Business Servers are popular legacy PBXs supported (VOSS notes that several additional PBXs are supported).

VOSS Discover ingests and creates detailed PBX inventory reports providing an overview of sites, users, numbers, extensions, and devices.

The migration reports can be used to identify numbers and devices in use and those that can possibly be “trimmed” before migration to reduce complexity and costs.

Data in VOSS Discover is stored in a SQL database which allows large amounts of data from many PBXs to be stored, normalized, and filtered. Ad-hoc queries can quickly be executed across all of the consolidated PBX data in order to better plan for a migration to Teams Phone.

One of the key capabilities that VOSS Discover provides is help in creating a unified dial plan within Teams Phone; this is especially important if multiple PBXs with different number or extension ranges are being consolidated into a single Teams tenant.

Teams Feature Mapping and Obstacle Identification

Sometimes you know where you want to go, however this does not mean you won’t encounter obstacles. In Star Trek: Discovery season 4, episode 10, Captain Burnham and her crew need to cross the Galactic Barrier to try and prevent the destruction of Earth and the Vulcan planet of Ni’Var. The destination is known; the path is unclear.

One of the VOSS Discover features I like best is the “Migration issues” report. This report clearly identifies potential and significant current configuration issues that will need to be addressed as part of your migration to Teams Phone.

For example, in the example shown below, 12 users have been assigned multiple extensions/numbers. Teams supports only one primary number per user, although a user can also have a private line and there are some workarounds.

The example also highlights a more critical 120 non-SIP devices. Note: SCCP phones run a proprietary Cisco protocol (Skinny Call Control Protocol) as opposed to SIP. Depending on your CallManager and device versions, some of these devices could be converted to using SIP and connected to Teams using the SIP Gateway.

The key is that the migration report flags issues so you can plan an approach ahead of a migration and thus avoid negative customer impacts.

Boldly Go

For many organizations, Microsoft Teams Phone provides improved communication and collaboration capabilities, often with a lower total cost of ownership.

VOSS Discover is one tool that can make planning the journey easier.

And when you are ready to “engage” either your warp drive (or your spore drive), VOSS Migrate automates the migration lifecycle based on the “sensor data” VOSS Discover provided, but let’s save the details for the next episode.

Engage!

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.

Find out more about VOSS for Microsoft or contact us.

These regular product innovation videos from VOSS provide valuable insights into how the latest trends are shaping the digital workplace market. As our customers navigate the complexities of modern collaboration environments, leveraging  innovation becomes essential for staying competitive and driving success.  Innovation from VOSS, in line with progress being made in the industry, empowers our customers to stay ahead.

To learn more about the VOSS product suite and latest innovations, please contact us.

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: