Transitioning to Microsoft Teams? Vyopta Saves Time, Money and Increases Productivity

There are obvious advantages for companies to consider transitioning to Microsoft Teams when looking at how to manage their unified communications capabilities. That is especially the case for large organizations with thousands of employees across multiple locations and a global footprint that already have access to Microsoft products through the company’s enterprise agreement with the software giant.

The costs that come from using alternative UC options, whether through on-premises networks or a cloud-based platform, can be reduced or eliminated by utilizing the Microsoft Teams product that is becoming a preferred tool for collaboration and communication. Since the Teams access has already been paid for in an enterprise agreement, transitioning to Microsoft Teams  as a primary tool for audio and video calls, chat and other collaboration functions presents the opportunity to eliminate a duplicative service for some.

Data-Driven Decisions

Companies opting to transition its users onto Teams must to do so in a way that doesn’t disrupt operations or productivity. That’s where Vyopta’s comprehensive UC data monitoring and analytics shows its clear value, with new end-to-end support for the Microsoft UC ecosystem including Skype For Business and Microsoft Teams.

A popular strategy for transitioning from an established UC service and onto Teams calls for mitigating risk and interruptions by moving the lightest users over to Skype first. By analyzing data to identify the lightest users or departments in a company using reports on Vyopta’s flexible single-pane view, UC and IT teams can find out who conducted the least meetings with an existing service. While this methodology worked well pre-Covid because low-volume users would face the least disruption during a changeover, many migrations happened practically overnight as organizations saw their workforces move to remote work. With ready access to MS Teams, many organizations saw an almost viral shift from other tools that had been previously established.

Vyopta’s detailed analytics allows close monitoring of usage and quality of calls, which make it possible to increase adoption as more users are transitioned and ensure that calls aren’t disturbed by excessive packet loss or other technical issues.

Monitor And Measure

When a Microsoft enterprise customer is going through a transition or whether the process has already been completed, Vyopta provides the detailed analytics managers need to ensure productivity remains level. Jaiganesh Lakshmisundaram, product manager for Vyopta, said monitoring data on high-volume users of UC tools is a crucial step for making sure a transition to new service hasn’t caused whole groups or departments to become disenfranchised by the change. Whether there’s a call quality issue or some other problem Vyopta can assemble data for Microsoft products that are typically spread across three or more control panels, making it easier to solve whatever is causing a drop in usage.

‘If I have a bunch of power users and all of a sudden some of them started dropping off, I can look at what is going on. The benefit is being able to identify them but also continually track them. Maybe they’re running into quality issues and being able to pinpoint that maybe they’re having a lot of video calls every day and logging a lot of bandwidth so some of their calls are getting throttled and they’re losing packets on the call. Then because of that they start to feel like every time I make a call I’m going to have a bad experience and now I don’t want to get on a call.

Lakshmisundaram said because Vyopta works as a multi-vendor solution to gather UC data in one place via customized reports, IT departments and managers can pinpoint the analytics they need to carry out their transition plan while learning and making improvements throughout the process.

“You get everything in a single pane view that lets you look at it all in one place. We can look at everything from end to end, from where the call begins to where it goes in the middle to where it is received,” he said. “Vyopta is at the sweet spot of where it already monitors these conference room endpoints and can already talk to these video cloud solutions from a hosted services perspective.”

Learn more about Vyopta for Microsoft Teams.

Chad Swiatecki is a business writer and journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Billboard, New York Daily News, Austin Business Journal, Austin American-Statesman and many other print and online publications. He lives in Austin, Texas and is a graduate of Michigan State University. Find him online on LinkedIn.