If you’re a local council using Microsoft Teams for collaboration, meetings, and chat, you’ve got several things in common with other local councils:
- Many moving parts: It’s not just Teams you’re looking after and everything else has a priority timestamp on it. Users aren’t power users and look to your team for help across the entire Teams feature set.
- Constant joiners and leavers: In large organizations, the nature of the beast is that people move on to new roles and their positions must be filled. People who stay move up the ladder, get new responsibilities, and need new access.
- Compliance and regulations: Payments must be PCI compliant, GDPR is a major data protection consideration, and procurement regulations mean every IT purchase is under scrutiny.
- Diverse and distributed teams: It’s no longer a single place of work. You’ve got complex networks, remote workers, and other variables that make Teams management a challenge.
- Budget and resource constraints: New hires, new technology, and new process mean change, time, and money. You must justify any cost by building a business case with a clear return on investment.
On top of that, you must balance the rest of your job. Unless you’re in the privileged position of solely managing Teams, you’ve probably got a million other technologies you’re looking after:
- Dynamics CRM
- Community engagement apps
- Contact center and phone system call flows
- Asset and inventory management systems
- Company intranet
These are just the tip of the iceberg.
But it goes deeper.
If you’re tasked with managing the Microsoft infrastructure of multiple councils, these tasks and challenges are considerably exacerbated. Instead of intimately knowing the quirks of your particular office and a handful of home workers, you’ve now got to cover a breadth of locations, a combination of home workers, mobile workers, and everything else in between.
Add to that the simple math of more users = more changes and more time and effort spend on provisioning tasks. It can paint a bleak picture when you’re rushed off your feet. And that is the exact time when manual errors occur.
It’s not your fault. It’s not Microsoft Teams fault. (Although it’s fun to blame technology for this sort of thing.)
So, where do we point the finger?
Unfortunately, it’s just human error. Something we can do very little about – unless we remove the human from the process.
Addressing the scary side of Microsoft Teams automated provisioning
On the face of it, it sounds like we’re suggesting a robot replaces you. Your job is deemed automatable and you’re going to need to look for a new role fairly soon.
That’s not the case.
What we’re proposing here is that you get dealt a break.
If you’re still creating manual scripts and working through moves, adds, and changes one by one, you’re leaving yourself open to human errors that can cost $500,000.
Sounds extreme?
That’s because it is.
When you rely on humans for your Microsoft Teams provisioning workflow, you’re exposing your business to the risk of human error.
75% of data loss is caused by human error.
One wrong click of a button and you can lose files, access, and even a full service.
In fact, 58% of service downtime can be attributed to an issue caused by a human.
Here’s how we remedy this
Your current process for provisioning new Teams users might look something like this:
- You get a new joiner request from HR
- You set up their hardware and create logins for their line of business apps
- You provision their Microsoft account on Entra (AzureAD)
- You add their Teams policies based on the HR ticket
- You add them to companywide Teams channels
Fast forward a few days/weeks/months and you get a ticket asking for different access or “something isn’t working”. Only, that something wasn’t requested by HR in the first place.
We’re not blaming HR here, either. They aren’t to know the ins and outs of Teams policies and user configuration.
But it’s still annoying and it’s still time-consuming. You’ve effectively provisioned this new user twice at this point.
All the while, you’re doing this manually. Which means the door is open to manual error.
In a blog post on improving the Teams provisioning workflow, we established a basic run of events whenever we (humans) get tasked with making manual changes:
- A new manual process begins, taking up time in your day.
- A change impacts what a user can and can’t do.
- There is the potential for something to go wrong, taking up even more of your time and stopping you from getting on with other project tasks and support tickets
What you could be doing instead is automating the provisioning of new users using Orto.
How Orto streamlines Microsoft Teams account setup
Orto is so-called because Orto-matic. Get it? We’re talking about automated provisioning for Microsoft Teams.
Instead of the manual, click-by-click, script-by-script, painful process, you can create user persona templates. Once you have your set of templates, a new starter joins your business, and you select which they slot into.
When creating your new user’s Microsoft accounts using Entra (formerly Azure AD), all you need to do is select their user persona based on department, geography, or seniority.
Once selected, Orto does the configuration for you. You configure the Azure AD attribute and out comes a fully configured Teams account with the relevant permissions and policies needed for that specific job role.
Here are the policies we can automate assignment of, straight out of the box:
- App Setup
- Audio Conferencing
- Call Hold
- Calling
- Call Park
- Channels
- Compliance Recording
- Emergency Calling
- Emergency Call Routing
- Enhanced Encryption
- Events
- Files
- IP Phone
- Meeting Broadcast
- Meeting
- Messaging
- Mobility
- Room Video Tele Conferencing
- Shifts
- Survivable Branch Appliance
- Video Interop Service
- Voice Applications
- WorkLoad
- Meeting Branding
- Dial Plan
If you’re a Teams admin, here’s how your life could look:
To be clear, we’re not suggesting you remove humans from the process entirely. You, the Teams admin, still need to create the persona templates first.
This requires a deep dive into what each job role requires. But once you have these, the ROI of Microsoft Teams auto-provisioning is clear.
You’ll save time, effort, and the cost of manual errors. Streamlining your Microsoft Teams account setup really should be a no-brainer.
How to get started with Orto for Teams
Sounds like something you want to get your teeth stuck into? I don’t blame you.
As a former provisioner, and someone who works with companies that have thousands of users, working with this new technology has somewhat filled me with jealousy. I wish I had access to it when my entire day was playing with BroadSoft and Skype for Business licenses.
If you’d like to start streamlining your Microsoft Teams account setup, book a demo with one of our Teams experts.
