communication and collaboration technology architecture
In Germany, PSTN carriers announced long time ago (!) to decommission their legacy PSTN access links (analog/ISDN …). Today, mid 2018, we are still not yet on ALL-IP everywhere. Migrations towards ALL-IP (SIP) are still in progress.
The unified communication projects I carried out the last years almost always included advisory services to design and deliver a future proof ALL-IP concept for different voice (PBX) infrastructures (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise OmniPCX, Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Skype for Business (onprem/online), Teams …). It’s daily business to think and plan for ALL-IP. Designing and planning solution and services for communication always includes at least the discussion of PSTN trunk design options to a certain level depending on the consulting engagement and scope of work. Usually in large and international enterprises (>10.000 users) ALL-IP migration can be a complex and long-term project endeavour. In this blog post, I’d like to (quickly) point out on what to pay attention, too, besides the default information worker office telephony service enabling users to make/receive PSTN calls, forward calls to a PSTN phone number or enable simring between a soft client (e.g. SFB/Teams) and mobile phone…
Let’s dig in a bit deeper into large-scale ALL-IP (and VoIP) projects: Typically, international companies have almost everything you can (and might cannot yet) imagine in their PBX infrastructure. Therefore it’s essential to define targets and work packages as below first …
For large infrastructure it helps to split up the project at least into two (parallel) work streams or sub-projects (if possible), for instance:
The above description is a high-level summary on typical things to keep in mind for telephony services as part of a digital workplace architecture. I hope it might guide you a little towards some telephony and ALL-IP hot spots to be aware of. Furthermore you can find more to read regarding to ALL-IP and special voice services below…
Do you want to try Microsoft Teams? You can now easily get Teams and evaluate some basic communication and collaboration features for up to 300 people. E.g. unlimited chat, search, 10 GB for storing your team data, 2 GB per person, audio/video meetings (P2P, multiparty), Office Online apps, third party apps and of course internal as well as external communication and collaboration.
For more details go and visit the Microsoft Teams Blog Post: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Introducing-a-free-version-of-Microsoft-Teams/ba-p/214592
In this blog post I outline what you should not do and instead what options you have got to succeed with your Teams rollout to our business (end) users.
“OMG there’ll be a new chat software on my device? When? Today? What? Why? Another one? Do we not have enough? Why can I not stick with the old … it worked somehow …” Well, if you’ll hear these question from your end users something went wrong! You might missed a proper change management execution in regards of user adoption and training! The bad approach to roll out a new tool on device/s to end users is to
Ouch!
In my experience, based on my consulting projects, I’m glad to notice (and tell you) that more and more companies from small to large focus also on user experience as critical success factor. So, to get users to adopt new technology and make them to leave a comfort zone you must help them to get them aboard the Teams client. That’s exactly what these companies do: They start to develop a user adoption and training strategy and initiate its execution. Mostly the user adoption and training does not end when the rollout ends. An user adoption program remains but the intensity and frequency of actions to drive adoption decrease but does not vanish. Office 365, Teams and the ecosystem is dynamic and someone needs to keep that in mind to keep users informed on minor and major changes as well as to help and find ways for the business to innovate and drive the company’s digital transformation. #livelonglearning #learningftw #adoptionftw
To reach excellent user experience you must execute a suited change management. What this looks like depends on your employees and users. There is no one-size-fits-all approach in my opinion. There are some common things to keep in mind, plan and execute but usually this is different from company-to-company.
It may help to involve someone from the marketing team because they can be supportive for internal project marketing to make users demanding Teams before it is even ready in your company.
Get in touch with your business stakeholders, demonstrate Teams, evangelize Teams and sell the added value which it brings to each user (group). Assuming that you consider to replace your existing telephony system (private branch exchange, pbx) and go from a legacy phone system to Teams direct routing you must plan a longer period for the change management! Migrating common information worker workloads to Teams plus telephony is a much bigger change (organizational / cultural change) for users. You will have discussions if you just want to quickly replace a legacy desk phone with a new fancy headset and soft client … you need to address this early enough and offer solutions on which users agree(ed) on. Just imagine you go to one employee and take away the phone from his/her desk which he/she used for maybe the last 20 years … and why do you still go in the office? Using Teams enables you for working from every spot around the globe where you have a sophisticated internet connection, e.g. home office, in the park, on the train, … where ever you like with many devices…
This culture is not yet common practice in many companies. There are still many companies tying information worker employees to their office desks. The final questions are why and is your corporate culture striving for this change?
