IT leaders today are asked to make Microsoft Teams do more and more heavy lifting, especially as remote work is the new normal. But how do you know if Teams is being used effectively, not just for basic collaboration, but telephony and those all-important video meetings? Microsoft 365 administrators need deep visibility into the quality of audio and video calls, PSTN performance, and the quality of content shared during Teams meetings.
That’s where CoreView’s Teams Advanced Add-On comes in. Teams Advanced adds to the already powerful Teams features of CoreSuite to deliver even more information about Teams usage and user experience. Teams Advanced has insight Microsoft can’t provide, with detailed information on every call so you can track the quality of voice, video, and sharing. You also get reports by department or group on how Teams services are being utilized. All this insight is available from the CoreSuite management interface that handles all M365 services.
The new Teams Advanced add-on builds on the already powerful Teams capabilities of CoreSuite with detailed analytics of Teams use across the organization, which can be measured over time to accurately gauge adoption. “Microsoft Teams is transforming enterprise collaboration, especially with many organizations looking at the ‘next normal’ for remote work,” said Shawn Lankton, CEO of CoreView. “The Teams Advanced add-on for CoreSuite collects and organizes all available Teams data and presents usage and quality insights. CoreView enables IT professionals to understand and optimize their organization’s productivity through this massive change.”
The Teams Advanced dashboard allows for tracking metrics for Teams calls, Teams users, and content sharing during Teams calls. Teams Advanced functions include:
CoreView customers are already leveraging our built-in Microsoft Teams analytics. Now Teams Advanced gives them even more power. “CoreView will help us understand what’s possible and with the adoption of the rich toolset of O365. When we look at things like SharePoint and Teams’ reports, we start seeing where we’re missing out, and where we could invest a little bit of time learning how to do things a bit better,” said Tobin M. Cataldo, Executive Director — Jefferson County Library Cooperative, Inc, Birmingham, Alabama
Here are four must have Teams features.
Make sure you’re getting the most out of your Teams for public switched telephone networks (PSTN) investment. See who is and isn’t using their PSTN numbers and track usage (and costs) over time. Support for direct routing plans will be added in a future release.
Rather than providing limited visibility from Microsoft-provided data that limits analysis to a single user, Teams Advanced Add-On allows searching and tracking down issues for particular users, or across departments. Users can be filtered by call, department, geography, or company.
This data is surfaced through the Teams Advanced dashboard, which tracks metrics for Teams calls, Teams users, and content sharing during Teams calls. It allows metrics and KPI (Key Performance Indicators) to be displayed at any point with real-time metrics. The dashboard can also serve as a jumping off point for examination and troubleshooting issues with particular users, calls, departments, or geographies.
Teams usage is one metric but being able to see how Teams is being adopted over time is even more valuable. Changes in collaboration may have impacts on the business, both positive and negative. Seeing an increase or decrease in calls, meetings, and chats by the department can help you identify where you may need to drive more collaboration.
Wouldn’t it be great to discover Teams problems in real-time so they can be fixed before productivity suffers? Teams Advanced features real-time analysis of users, calls, quality per department, geography, or company are all invaluable for troubleshooting issues. Teams Usage Analytics pulls data from Microsoft and enriches it with additional attributes from the user’s Azure AD information.
Teams have rich and insanely cost-effective voice and unified communications (UC) capabilities, which are tightly integrated with the full suite of M365 productivity services. Teams can replace the need for expensive and inflexible legacy voice systems, replaced by Voice over IP (VoIP), enhanced with conferencing, video chat, meetings, and even built-in recording and transcription.
There are huge economic benefits to fully exploiting Team’s voice features. In years past, voice systems such as PBXes and related gear were massively expensive. Harnessing Teams to provide these functions is far less expensive, and provides vastly more function and flexibility.
Microsoft long ago targeted unified communications with solutions such as Lync. In the early days, Microsoft tried to compete with established UC vendors such as Cisco, but then switched to a different, decidedly Microsoft direction. Microsoft really hit its stride recently with Teams and its deep integration with all Office 365 services. Teams “combines not just voice collaboration but data and all the data assets that Microsoft has to bring to bear, such as integrating with the information you’re currently working on, the ability to share that data within a Teams’ session, plus white boarding and all kinds of other application and data integrations,” Matt Smith, CoreView Solutions Architect, pointed out.
There is a huge ROI for deploying a full collaboration suite like Teams, and voice and UC greatly add to those economic benefits. The 32-page Forrester Report, The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Teams, finds the ROI of Teams adoption to be a staggering 832%. The report offers formulas you can apply to your own Teams workloads, and to measure the value of a successful Teams migration campaign, which can be easily tracked on an ongoing basis.
Voice is a huge area of payback. “Teams allows customers to get rid of an array of communications hardware and software tools, and reduce or eliminate the use of non-Teams web conferencing, as well as telephony solutions and services such as mobile phone, long-distance, and on-premises telephony products,” the report found. Telecom savings over three years for 5,000 workers is $648,727, Forrester found.
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