I know it’s a cliché, but one of the things I like most about my job is getting out and meeting customers. I genuinely believe in open and honest dialogue, and it’s important for me that my customers know that they can always approach me about anything that’s on their mind. This also means that I’m fortunate to get feedback straight from the field, about the telecoms industry in general and AudioCodes products in particular.
On a recent trip to Europe, I visited a large enterprise that I’m honored to have worked with for many years, and who adopted Skype for Business several years ago. Although they are very happy with their Skype for Business solution, a number of issues that I’ve often heard elsewhere came up in my discussions with them. There’s a good chance that you’re already quite familiar with these concerns. Let’s have a quick look at some of them.
The way my customer explained it, the challenges start at the planning stage. That’s when you realize that customized deployments are required every time because each enterprise environment is different. Working out these issues can be costly, and that’s even before you’ve actually got around to deploying anything.
Then, once Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business has been successfully deployed, you can easily get snowed under with a whole raft of different management tools and applications, including PowerShell, just to manage things on a day-to-day basis. You need to become a power user of all these tools. But if you don’t have the knowledge or the time to get up to speed, you have to take on in-house experts to do the work for you. As you probably know, such experts inhabit a specialized niche and can command hefty salaries. Not really the path you want to go down if you care about the bottom line.
There is also the matter of how time-consuming it is to keep an eye on such a wide array of control panels all the time. And don’t forget, of course, that with all these disparate applications it can end up being pretty hard to figure out exactly who’s responsible for what in your Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business service level agreements.
On top of all that, the same user provisioning tasks need to be performed again and again. Routine maintenance places considerable demands on your time, detracting from more important tasks. This can have unexpected knock-on effects on things like productivity, which can be negatively affected if new employees and their correct user privileges aren’t added quickly enough because instead you’re tied up with repetitive administrative work.
We at AudioCodes became all too accustomed to these stories, so we developed a tool to do something about it – something that would help to simplify user lifecycle and identity management across Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business deployments. That “something” is User Management Pack™ 365.
User Management Pack™ 365 is available for on-premises, hosted, cloud and hybrid Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business deployments. It consolidates everything you need in one place, instantly streamlining Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business deployment and user management. You can quickly assign definitions and policies in bulk, resulting in greater productivity. Because employees can be granted or denied access quickly and easily, security is significantly improved. You can grant new policies or routing rules easily and quickly. And if you’re encountering difficulties with managing and assigning DIDs per company, User Management Pack™ 365 will simplify and automate the process.
Best of all, you can say goodbye to PowerShell, the different control panels and all the other management tools, and work with a single pane of glass instead. You can break your dependence on outside experts, eliminate excessive training costs, reduce your workload and slash your OPEX at the same time.
So now, whenever I talk to customers who swear by Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business but find its day-to-day management just a bit too daunting, I never hesitate to recommend User Management Pack™ 365. I know they won’t regret giving it a try. So why don’t you check out our application note, User Management Pack™ 365 for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business, and find out what User Management Pack™ 365 can do for you too. The only regret you’ll have is that you weren’t introduced sooner.