If you have made the decision or are thinking about moving to Microsoft Teams for your organization’s UCaaS solution, you may want to consider a partnership with CDW to manage your solution. In this article, I will go into the key features that the CDW service provides and all the options to help you align to the right enhanced support solution.

CDW offers three levels of additional support on Microsoft Teams environments. Each service level is designed to assist customers in a way that goes above and beyond what is included in the standard support from Microsoft. Having additional support can help position success with business objectives. I will focus on the following features: problem management with expert engineers; live monitoring/dashboards and reporting; moves, adds, changes and deletes (MACD) flexibility/automation; and customer success with adoption services.

Our customers sometimes assume that since they are moving to the cloud, they don’t need anyone to provide additional support for the solution as there is no environment to manage. While that is a true statement, there is still a solution to manage. Other customers plan on simply using the free Microsoft support that is included in their license, so why bother looking for anything else. With the included support you or one of your users will still have to work with the Microsoft support engineer.

The method that CDW uses to support customers brings a deeper view into the account and the overall impact compared to just opening tickets and resolving one thing that might be impacting the issue. CDW provides problem management, which means an engineer is looking at your cases and looking for trends or possible related issues and making the association for the whole resolution versus one instance.

For example, imagine having an infrequent call quality issue where you might have 100 people affected a month and calling into Microsoft Support. Each ticket opened might have someone looking solely at the issue at hand rather than other things that might be impacting in the bigger picture. With CDW services, the experts get to know your environment. If you need to call in, there is a certain level of familiarity with your environment. Additionally, our staff will look for common trends on tickets and even use tools (covered in the next paragraph) to assist in coming to a root cause much sooner.

Gaining visibility into your environment is more powerful than one might think. With the tools that CDW utilizes to support our Microsoft Teams customers, we are able to go above what is included with your license. For example, using dashboard access a customer and/or a CDW engineer can search for a call easily and quickly identify where a problem might have occurred.

Similarly, the data that CDW collects can be used to help troubleshoot issues. For example, if a customer has an issue from a specific location from a specific device with a specific call result, a custom display or alert can be generated to gage impact and or take the burden off the user to report every such instance.

In addition to using the tool in the previously mentioned manner, it has many other benefits including drill downs, customizations, single pane of glass for multi-vendor solutions, etc. Having a powerful portal or tool to help provide insights, alerting and dashboarding helps drive to a resolution much faster, as well as giving a view into adoption and measurement of specific key performance indicators.

Including MACD tasks into service options helps take the burden off administrators for doing that work in house. When purchasing either the essential or premium service, the customer will have access to an industry-leading provisioning portal that streamlines MACD tasks. The portal reduces the time to set up a new user by about 70 percent.

With prebuilt packages and built-in DID management, this portal provides real-time production. The portal also supports multiple platform environments such as Cisco and Microsoft Teams. Customers today either have a mixed environment or are looking to create one and being able to have one place to manage users brings simplification to the business.

In addition, there is the option for MACD automation. For example, customers with ServiceNow have the option to integrate to CDW’s ServiceNow instance and even the MACD portal, which can take a request from the customer’s ServiceNow ticketing system and will read in that ServiceNow request and process the requested MACD automatically.

In recent studies/research, many customers are looking for adoption and customer success-type services. This includes additional end user training options, as well as providing insight about the use of the solution, which can help customers drive end user adoption and a higher level of end user satisfaction/productivity. With this feature, CDW will work with each customer and come up with a custom adoption plan to best meet the customer business objectives.

In summary, CDW offers many services that include features that can really help take the administrative burden from a break/fix and/or provisioning situation, provide insights and help end user satisfaction with the Microsoft Teams solution. So, whether you prefer to use CDW’s Managed Collaboration Anywhere service or not, I hope the information shared will help you plan for success as you consider or begin to migrate to a new UCaaS Microsoft Teams environment, or are simply interested in adding this service to your existing environment.

Andy Kleinheinz is a Collaboration Technical Architect for CDW.