One of the first blog posts we wrote when we launched Orto for Teams was titled, You Could Save $500,000 Using This Microsoft Teams Provisioning Tool.
You still can and we still beat that drum.
Many IT admins will look towards their own experience and skill to come up with creative ways of implementing automation with technology they already have access to. As a result, of course there are ways to automate Teams Phone provisioning for ‘free’.
The question really is: ‘As a business, is that something that you want to support?’
And is it really “free”?
You may be able to create your own scripts, database, and process automation to bind it all together, but your knowledge and time isn’t free.
You’ll have a cost in time to develop and test your solution, but the biggest cost is ongoing support of that solution you’ve made.
When things go wrong, who will you call?
How much time will you spend making sure the free solution remains functional and up to date with Microsoft and your business process needs?
Then, what happens to the business when the person who made the solution and knows how it works leaves, and then it breaks?
Implementing in-house created solutions, although ingenious, can leave businesses exposed to significant risk if you’re not fully set up with a dedicated development practice to support them.
Often this is a risk businesses aren’t willing to take and they look for off-the-shelf solutions that can deliver what they need.
If you do want to create your own automation tool, then we would recommend you look at Microsoft MVP Martin Heusser’s Teams Phone Number Management tool:
- https://heusser.pro/p/teams-phone-number-management-on-a-budget-e25d53f65caf
- https://heusser.pro/p/teams-phone-number-management-list-part-2-b5385e348a3a
- https://heusser.pro/p/teams-phone-number-management-list-part-3-e083a320004d
If not free and in-house, how do you automate Teams provisioning?
The answer here is a Teams automation tool specifically built for this purpose.
Not another tool engineered with a cast-off feature, but one with your exact needs in mind.
Codeless Solutions
When you’re looking for a tool to automate Teams provisioning, your objective should be to remove any requirement for using your own scripts.
Using API endpoints is great for solving small and bespoke problems, but they shouldn’t be the main interface for creating automation. You’re buying a tool to alleviate complexity and reliance on custom scripts and processes, not add to them.
If you need to deploy Power Automate flows or Azure Runbooks to sit between your number management tool and Teams, then you probably have the wrong product.
They may appear flexible, but remember you must build, maintain, and support the automated middleware between that system and Teams. When it breaks, it’s your responsibility to solve and you may not always have the skills within your team to do that.
Choosing a tool that can schedule, automate, and manage provisioning all within a single user interface and without code (even low code) is critical for streamlining your provisioning process and relieving your admin resources to do more important jobs.
Integrations
An important part of any provisioning solution is integration with your ITSM systems. Automation is great, but not all provisioning tasks can be automated without first obtaining approval from a senior manager.
The most common example of this in Teams Phone is the enablement of Teams Phone and a number for a user.
As assigning a number and associated calling plan represents a cost to the business, some may want to gate this task with an approval process. After approval, the process of assignment can be automated, but first, someone needs to say ‘OK’.
You may be already using an ITSM system like ServiceNow, where you can build your own internal products in your service catalog. One of these products could be Teams Phone, where the user completes an order form providing their justification for needing it.
Using ServiceNow workflows, you can create a process that requires approval from the cost center owner. Once approval is received, ServiceNow can process the request by triggering the appropriate actions, scripts, or tools.
Integrating your number management tool into something like ServiceNow workflows will enable you to automatically assign a Teams phone number to the user without your service desk team needing to manually do it.
How much should you pay for a provisioning tool?
In the world of SaaS, we’re used to paying per user per month. But does this model really fit a Teams Phone automation tool? After all, once you’ve assigned a number to a user, its job is pretty much done for that user until there is a change.
Experience says most organizations want the costs presented to them as a per user, per month figure. Ultimately, the cost is the same in both a monthly vs per annum model. It’s just the presentation of that cost.
You should be approaching the pricing from a value standpoint. Today, doing Teams Phone provisioning tasks manually can cost you $45 in resource a time, and that’s if your team get it right the first time.
Get it wrong and that cost can rise to over $80.
For a 1,000-user business with national averages of staff turnover, this can equate to over $300,000 of IT admin salary being spent on Teams provisioning processes.
This isn’t counting the amount of time end users are underproductive waiting for IT to complete tickets.
With a Teams Phone automation tool, not only can you release the burden on your IT staff, making them more efficient, but you reduce the vast majority of errors. You’re able to implement standards that are baked into automated processes and not circumnavigated or misinterpreted.
Imagine a world where you didn’t need to keep a 100-page process document up to date and run intensive training courses for engineers to communicate and act on these changes into process.
Imagine the process was programmatically laid out, controlled, and instantly understandable to engineers when they login.
This is the value a Teams Phone provisioning tool brings to your business. If they cost $100,000 a year, they’re saving you at least $200,000 a year in lost productivity organizationally.
This is an excerpt from our latest 70-page ebook on Teams Phone management.
Get your free copy here: Mastering Teams Phone
