Microsoft Teams has been one of the big winners over the past two years as companies around the world embraced remote working – but what role will it play as offices reopen? Our Product Manager, Vincent Le Thiec, spoke to UC Today to discuss the role Teams is having on the Hybrid Workplace and how a multi-vendor approach may be the best approach for some businesses.
Microsoft
Let’s take a look at the improvements Kurmi has made to simplify automation with each manufacturer:
Kurmi’s offering the best Cisco integration on the market!
All the Cisco Voice Gateways are now supported on CUCM 11 or higher!
Administrators can manage ports of the following Cisco devices: VG2801, VG2811, VG2821, VG2851, VG3825, VG3845, and VG3945E.
With Kurmi, administrators can declare Cisco servers, CUCM, and Unity Connection in the Cisco HCM-F.
They can assign the Cisco Headset Template to Cisco User Profiles.
The new Cisco license lets the end-user use Webex Teams in place of Jabber. Webex Teams, connected to our CUCM, is a new softphone for Cisco.
Assign “CUCM Calling” licenses to Webex users. Without any additional development, our Webex connector is compatible with new features offered by Cisco.
Tweaks to Avaya:
Administrators can manage Avaya Media Files on the Avaya Media Server. The SOAP API is used for this new connector.
Administrators can manage Avaya Communication Profile Set through the System Manager API. The Kurmi data model will be changed with this feature.
Communication Profiles: Communication Profiles support communication interactions through Avaya Communication Services. Communication Profiles can be CM Endpoint, Messaging, OfficeLinx, Session Manager, CS 1000, CallPilot Messaging, IP Office, Presence, Avaya Breeze™, Conferencing, or Equinox Conferencing.
Administrators can manage Avaya Communication Addresses through System Manager API.
Avaya Communication Addresses: A user may have one or more Communication Profiles for registering one or more SIP user handles (phone extensions) to the Session Manager. This will enable users to set up (optionally) an origination and termination application sequence as their preferred call-routing method.
To register an SIP phone with Session Manager, at least one Communication Profile must be administered containing the Session Manager’s details and at least one SIP-type Communication Address must be defined. Handles can also be matched to a Communication Manager station and/or messaging subscriber.
A communication address can be used to communicate with the contact. This can be the contact’s phone number, e-mail address, SIP, or IM. One or more communication addresses are defined for the user in relation to the handle plus domain in userinfo@domainpart format when routing a communication interaction to the user.
Microsoft keeps adding features!
- Administrators can manage Microsoft Teams Call Queues and assign users to them using Kurmi Services. Four new services have been added to cover this. Call queues provide a method of routing callers to people in your organization who can help with a particular issue or question.
- Microsoft Meeting Rooms can now be managed (set up) without activating full Exchange management.
- Administrators can assign the Teams IP Phone policy and Teams Mobility policy to Microsoft Teams through the Kurmi web portal.
- A pool of service accounts lets you remove the limit of three PowerShell sessions. To solve this problem, Kurmi has set up a service account pool for Microsoft 365 management. Systems administrators can define several service accounts to manage one Microsoft tenant.
Release 7.4.0 expands the features managed by Kurmi and provides a better administrator experience, with upgraded UI and UX.
This UI/UX upgrade includes better hierarchy pop-up ergonomics and an all-new “My Account” page for administrators. It also displays more information before deletion. It’s more flexible, so you can customize the Kurmi Services listing pages.
The ergonomics for “My IP Phone Login Service” on Kurmi Unified Selfcare are all new for Cisco users.
The self-service portal’s menu and buttons are more accessible. We’ve improved ergonomics for “slow” pages, and your ability to export files using asynchronous features, resulting in better performance.
Unified Communications interoperability is getting a lot of attention, as more and more employees work from home. Yet while progress has been made, there is still a long way to go.
Will flexibility at work be the new normal?
The coronavirus crisis has triggered a rush to telecommute. Companies and their employees have been thrust into a massive experiment in this decentralized way of working. What if teleworking becomes the norm?
It’s a fact: remote work is gaining in popularity. And the coronavirus crisis has accelerated the timeline. Companies are thinking hard about the need to spend time in the office. This upheaval in working habits has shaken up companies and CIOs, who have been forced to react immediately by deploying new working arrangements, a new management approach, and the right collaborative tools.
Companies are also handling multiple communications channels, whether in-house or to customers and prospects. And the proliferation of tools has complicated management and security tasks considerably.
Boosting interoperability in Unified Communications & Collaboration solutions
Interoperability is critical to ensuring the long-term success of a Unified Communications project. Customers need it to focus on creating value rather than solving problems that arise when IT systems don’t work well together.
So it’s important to understand how companies work with their partners at the collaborative level. By deploying a Unified Communications solution, will a company be assuming that its customers have made the same technology choices it has? Will it deploy a solution that consciously limits the number of its potential business partners? That’s how critical interoperability is.
How will Unified Communications providers react?
As you see, the need for more interoperability has probably never been greater. But one question persists: What will Unified Communications providers do? Over the past few years, we’ve seen vendors attempt to collaborate and provide a ground level of Unified Communications interoperability. The point of the announcement by Cisco and Microsoft last year is to allow users to join a Microsoft Teams meeting from a Webex room device. They also have the option of joining a Cisco Webex meeting from a Microsoft Teams room.
Why is this option so difficult to implement widely, let alone universally? Because UC vendors all want to protect their piece of the overall UC market. If all platforms and services were interoperable from the start, it would be hard to tell providers apart, other than by price. Profit margins would decrease considerably.
This is one of the main reasons vendors approach interoperability partnerships with caution. Unfortunately for customers, we can assume that vendors are not going to change this behavior quickly – regardless of the need. So pressure should be applied to demand this kind of improvement in available services. That’s why there should also be a push to seek provisioning software to secure management in a multi-vendor environment.
We’re pleased to be sharing these new features with you. This release will simplify the deployment and daily management of your Unified Communications & Collaboration solutions. You’ll really appreciate its strengths:
1/ Greater time savings with an even more intuitive interface
Choose a department easily:
To save time in your routine operations, we’ve reduced the number of clicks, to give you quicker access to the departments/sites you’re responsible for. With our intuitive search system, you just enter a few letters to find the department and quickly run the first operations, e.g. creating a new user.
Enhance security with the new audit reports:
To secure your data and stay in line with your business rules, Kurmi’s new release offers you more user-friendly audit reports so you can track data and identify any inconsistencies (aka potential security breaches) in a glance. You’ll be able to react more quickly and take corrective measures.
And we’ve completed other optimizations to save you precious time in the administration and day-to-day management of your UC & Collaboration solutions. You can see them up close – just ask us for a demo
2/ Faster deployment
Kurmi has enhanced its templates to optimize platform configuration time. This means you can use your UC & Collaboration solutions more quickly, no matter what the technology (Avaya, Cisco/BroadSoft, or Microsoft).
3/ A more powerful SDK Connector to manage all your applications from Kurmi
With the flexible, massively customizable Kurmi platform, administrators can manage all their UC & Collaboration solutions through a single user interface. But Kurmi goes much further than that. Its API and connecting SDK give admins the power to pair a new application with Kurmi and manage it from the platform. With our SDK Connector, organizations can apply their own business rules to boost their ops teams’ productivity – and slash costs.
Luware, dedicated to contact centers on Microsoft platforms, has recently been integrated into Kurmi. The goal is to have a single point of entry for managing not just your UC & Collaboration solutions, but all your apps, internal and external.
4/ Fine-tuning services to match your needs
Thanks to the package feature in Kurmi, you can quickly define services to fit your users’ needs. And you can upgrade them and create new ones, without limits. When creating a user, assign them the right package for their profile, giving them access to certain mandatory or optional services/features. With this new release, the service providers will also be able to define optional services, such as leaving it up to the admin or user to choose three out of the five available services.
5/ And with our technology partners
AVAYA
With this new release, you get the full look and feel of Kurmi for administering and managing Aura 8
- Numbering Plan Management
- Delegation/RBAC
- Service packages
- Log history and rollback
- Bulk management
- LDAP synchronization and integration with ITSMs (ServiceNow)
- And so much more
CISCO
With Cisco HCS for their UCaaS offers, service providers will save precious time deploying new customers, thanks to optimization of such actions as choosing a country. We’ve also integrated a new dial plan, in line with those in the previous release — now including Honduras and the Dominican Republic.
MICROSOFT
Microsoft’s operating method is based on an asynchronous system. This means you can’t instantly create your users. With Kurmi, your admins no longer have to sit in front of their screens waiting for the task to be completed. With Kurmi’s intuitive interface, you can quickly create your users, and our software does the rest. Now, 7.2.0 uses visual indicators to keep you informed of its progress.
Plus, this new release includes new policies for Microsoft Teams, including
- Emergency policies assignment and provisioning (Emergency Calling, Emergency Call Routing)
- Compliance recording policy assignment
Since originally launching Teams in 2017 as part of the Office 365 suite, Microsoft has extensively expanded its features. Now, it’s a collaborative work tool used to manage conversations, hold video meetings, share files, and run Office applications. Plus, it has integrations with third-party applications.
Years later, Microsoft Teams has more than 320 million daily users (far from the 2 million in 2017).
Many companies have already adopted Microsoft Teams, and more plan to in the next couple of years. But, migrating from legacy unified communications systems is a complex process that can be difficult to carry out.
Kurmi has helped countless customers make the move. And, we’ve identified the four key steps for Microsoft Teams migration.
Unlike implementing from scratch, migrating amounts to leaving your current system, which we’ll call A, to move into a new system, B. For example, this could be going from Microsoft Skype for Business on-premises 2019 to Microsoft Teams.
THE FOUR STEPS IN MIGRATION:
1. Audit & Clean Data:
In this first step, we’re collecting the information we want to move from environment A to environment B. We have to audit the data, clean it, and repackage it in the right format so we can upload it into the new environment. This step is critical as we don’t want to start off on the wrong foot with messy data and inconsistent formatting in our new system.
2. Create Target Environment:
The second operation is to build the target environment by creating associations between the two environments.
Here, we’ll map environment A to environment B, identifying the corresponding fields in each system and the data that needs to move from A to B. We’ll often want to add new configurations during a migration to take advantage of different features in the new system, so it’s best to add them to the data imported into the new target environment.
3. Migrate Data:
Once the plan has been drawn up and the mapping done between the source and target data, the actual migration of data can start.
To make sure your employees can start using your new system, you’ll want to ensure a stable new environment with no technical issues. The best way to do this is to use a dedicated migration tool to retrieve the recorded information, reformat the data, and then push this information to the target environment.
A dedicated application will provide a log of operations carried out and mitigate risk.
4. Decommission Source Environment:
Once the data has been migrated and the new environment is operational, there’s one last step, which is to decommission the source environment—in other words, delete environment A. This is an essential step to save money on servers that you won’t be using anymore.
Migration can be long and complicated, involving many moving pieces (pun intended). And it can be a source of errors, particularly when you’re trying to migrate at scale.
With a dedicated solution like Kurmi Provisioning Suite, you can streamline and automate many aspects of your migration. Kurmi Provisioning Suite connects to both the source and target environments, and easily moves users and their configurations from the old to the new. With visibility across both systems, IT teams can migrate at their own pace—user by user or batch by batch, based on a migration schedule that’s defined upstream.
Ready to streamline your migration? Take the first step by requesting a demo.
