How to Leverage PowerSuite’s Microsoft Teams Functionality

Unify Square has been doing business for over 10 years as a Microsoft Partner specializing in conferencing and voice. We have always had a laser focus on some variant of Skype for Business – LCS, OCS, Lync or Skype for Business. You can imagine our surprise, therefore, when some key Microsoft executives from outside of the Skype for Business team requested that we come meet them about two years ago for a private demo. And there it was – Microsoft Teams. This was not our grand-daddy’s Oldsmobile!

Making the Switch to Microsoft Teams

In the intervening two years since that demo, a lot has changed here at Unify Square, but a lot has stayed the same. We’re still the same Skype for Business experts, focusing on conferencing and voice, and we expect to continue to leverage that expertise for years to come given the conservative technology adoption and migration path of many large enterprises whom we service. However, we’re now ALSO a Microsoft Teams shop through and through. Not only do we use Teams for all of our internal (and external where possible) chats, conferences, and calls. And, not only do we store all of our key content and documents in various Teams document repositories. But, most importantly, we have pivoted our purpose-built performance and operations software, PowerSuite, to focus on Teams as well.

The Market Leader in Teams Performance and Operations Monitoring and Management

We’ve spent a lot of cycles writing about how to prepare for and execute upon the switch to Teams. You can find blog posts about making the move, eBooks about deciding to make the move and even webinars about the journey to Teams. There are a lot of factors which ultimately contribute toward a successful move, but perhaps the biggest and number one factor is that of visibility. On the IT side, you have to see and know what is going on with your users and with your meetings, chats, and calls. This is where PowerSuite comes in and where our leadership in adding Teams visibility to PowerSuite provides superb ROI for organizations.

PowerSuite for Teams Leaderboard

To enumerate the ROI advantages, here’s a quick, but by no means exhaustive, ‘tour’ through the highlights of the current PowerSuite support for Microsoft Teams. We’re listing the solutions and features starting with the most recent additions and extending back to the spring of 2018 when we first started adding Teams features and integration with PowerSuite.

• Teams Call Data Integration: Microsoft just recently began their early technical preview program (in which we are lucky to be able to take part) of their new Call Data API providing access to ‘near-real-time’ Teams data in the cloud. When this API goes live in 2019 it will enable all kinds of interesting call quality reporting and scoring scenarios. For now, an example of a preview version of our Executive Dashboard solution showcases the tracking of active conferences enterprise-wide over a specific time period. The PowerSuite benchmarking feature also allows us to compare conference utilization to the average conference use of all other PowerSuite customers.

• Microsoft Teams in Operations Dashboard: The Operations Dashboard is one of the oldest and most used apps in PowerSuite. This app is where the IT Pro goes to drill down and troubleshoot various voice quality related issues. As of early December 2018, you can also now use the Operations Dashboard for detailed views of Teams voice quality. We have also utilized our industry-leading and Gartner spotlighted benchmarking technology to allow organizations to easily compare the voice quality (poor call percentages) between the two platforms. In many cases, the timeframe when Teams voice quality shows itself to be on par or better than Skype for Business voice quality becomes the tipping point to signal a full migration to Teams.

• Phone Number Management for Teams: Building on what PowerSuite already enables for Skype for Business, this app enables phone number management for and bulk migrations to Teams. This solution includes phone number assignments and user onboarding, off-boarding, and termination, as well as policy management.

• Service Health for Teams: The Service Health app in PowerSuite is the starting point for viewing the three core KPI data points: user satisfaction, service availability and voice quality. While the former two data points are still pending (awaiting the data flows from Microsoft API’s) we began shipping this app with Teams voice quality topline information in September 2018. When viewing Microsoft Teams data in Service Health, it is also easy to navigate directly to the Operations Dashboard to view more detailed information and breakdowns as already showcased above.

• Enhanced Workstream Collaboration Analytics: The Help Desk, Usage & Adoption Dashboard and Executive Dashboard solutions all showcase a myriad of different reporting and analytics views to help track Teams usage. Below we’ve chosen the Teams Champions view in the Usage & Adoption app to highlight but a few of the innovative implementations of Teams data in PowerSuite.

The Full Teams Experience…and More Coming Soon

PowerSuite is leading the way with software support for Microsoft Teams, but Unify Square employees find themselves equally busy and engaged on Teams-related projects for consulting and managed services. Organizations around the globe are looking for advice from our consultants on how to prepare for and execute a Teams migration. Similarly, once Teams is deployed, many other organizations are looking to engage us as a cloud managed service provider and have us drive all IT operations relating to Teams on a 24×7 basis. You can read more about all the details of our complete Teams support here.

Our customers keep coming back to us because of our innovative software and we pride ourselves on constantly reinventing and improving. Every month (and sometimes more frequently) a new sprint yields new features and functionality. And, because PowerSuite is SaaS-based, our customers can immediately benefit from the newly added functionality.

Do you feel like you’re missing out? We’d be more than happy to provide a demo – or if you’re not quite ready, you can sign up for our mailing list (located on the top right of this blog) so that you can keep in touch.

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