Back in the day, I’d spend countless hours provisioning new users, setting up phones, and making moves, adds, and changes on the fly.
Okay, it was 40 hours a week. But sometimes it felt countless.
Even though I loved my provisioning job(s), it was prone to error. Or maybe I was prone to error?
Actually, it’s humans who are prone to error. According to science, numerous studies confirm that the majority of “issues” we see in business and in our personal lives are caused by… us.
It’s natural. Just look at the stats:
- 85% of workplace accidents can be attributed to human error
- Human error is responsible for approximately 94% of car accidents in the US
- Human error contributes to around 70-80% of aviation accidents
- Human errors account for 23% of all cybersecurity breaches
Now, I’m not going to run through all the errors I made and how to fix them. I already did that in my confession blog post.
But what I am going to do is run through a list of things that would have saved my bacon, saved my customers downtime, and saved me countless hours of re-provisioning after things had gone wrong.
The goal?
To educate you how to make your Microsoft Teams provisioning seamless and error-free.
Spoiler alert: Automation is going to become your best friend and make you look like an error-proof machine. This may not carry over into the rest of your life, but your Teams provisioning is going to be a rocket ship 🚀
1 – User persona templates
Imagine you had a templated profile for everyone who joined the People Services team in New York. Or the HR team in London.
Each profile has the relevant policies that particular type of user needs to do their job from day one.
They’re assigned to the right call queues and they have a phone number assigned automatically. Because, you know, they need to call people in the outside world.
Everything you’d usually spend time configuring is stored in that user persona. All you need to do us tell Orto for Teams that Ella Jackson is joining the People Services team in the US and the user provisioning is taken care of.
How?
When you create Ella Jackson on Entra (Azure AD), Orto pulls this information and automatically generates everything she’ll need for Teams.
The end result?
Fewer manual provisioning errors and a ton of time and money (through lost time fixing those errors) saved.
Further Reading: How To Reduce Manual Errors In Microsoft Teams
2 – Automatic assignment to call queues
When you’re done provisioning a new user, or have automatically provisioned a new user, the next step is to make sure they’re receiving the right calls.
This will differ based on their role and seniority. Like assigning their permissions and policies, you can automate Teams call queue assignments using Orto.
Instead of using PowerShell to engineer a new user in a call queue, leaving yourself open to manual error and lost time, our Queue Groups allow you to group together all Teams call queues that a department/group of users may need access to and bundles to assign to your users via Orto.
So, let’s say Ella join the HR Management team. She’s setup as a new HR Management user (see section 1 above for the persona setup) so you can now assign her to the call queue group.
Rather than having to manually add Ella to every incoming queue, you can assign all call queue groups in one go.
HR might be a bad example because how often does the outside world call HR?
But you can imagine a customer service team handling tons of inbound calls from all your customers. When each agent handles calls from different marketing campaigns, sales pushes, or different support numbers, there are a lot of potential inbound routes.
Assign a user to a call queue group, gaining access to every call queue they need, instead of adding them (and risk missing them) one by one.
When you use Orto for call queue assignment, you can:
- Group call queues together by job role, location, or function
- Add agents to all queues in the group at once
- Eliminate the need for PowerShell
- Remove agents from queues in a single click
3 – Automatic moves, adds, changes, and deletions
Ah, the old MACDs.
On the face of it, making a small change or deleting a user is a simple task.
Find the user. Make the change. Hit save.
Only, those versed in provisioning know all too well that it doesn’t always go down that way.
That’s why Orto for Teams extends its functionality to live users too. It’s not just the initial provisioning of new users that gets automated; it’s in-flight moves, adds, and changes too.
So the next time someone moves departments and needs new policy access, there’s no need to strip back their license, assign new policies, get it wrong, and do it again.
Instead, change their policy assignment in one click.
If Peter started in a sales role but is transferring to the marketing team, you can amend his policies and access by simply changing his user persona (remember the templates in the section above?) to marketing.
One click. That’s it.
Further Reading: The Real Cost Of Manual Microsoft Teams Changes
4 – Number usage alerts
Think about the last request you had to add a new number to a user. Or a call queue or an auto attendant. Wherever a number is needed, think about the last time you ran out of numbers available to assign.
It’s a nightmare, isn’t it?
You delay configuring that new user, meaning they can’t make or receive external calls. You must order a new range from your telco and wait the associated lead time.
All in all, when you’ve run out of available numbers, you’re on the backfoot and feel like there’s nothing you can do.
So how about the introduction of Usage Alert Thresholds?
As part of the Orto number management solution, you can get alerts when you exceed low thresholds of spare numbers.
Choose from global thresholds or custom thresholds per range for effective number management.
Further Reading: Get Notified When Your Number Ranges Reach Usage Alert Thresholds
5 – A single pane of glass for number management
There’s nothing worse than switching between apps to complete a task.
You highlight a number, hit copy, hit paste, and…. hope for the best.
Did you know that we switch apps 3,600 times PER DAY?
Crazy.
So if you could minimize your Teams admin by relying on one place for all your Teams provisioning, number management, and licenses, you’d bite my hand off, right?
Yes. I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t that the Teams Admin Center?
The Teams Admin Center (TAC) is great.
But…
You still have to switch to Entra, and to PowerShell, and into Teams itself. And, even then, you’ve got to do multiple checks across all your systems and duplicate entries in certain boxes.
If your Teams setup is remotely complex, it’s not just the TAC where you’re spending your time managing users and numbers.
Instead, we created a single pane of glass for Teams management. And guess what, it’s within Orto for Teams. (You know, that great tool I keep mentioning that will make my Teams provisioning seamless and error-free.)
When you connect your Microsoft Teams tenant to Orto, you get access to our single pane of glass portal for all your management changes.
You get access to all your users and numbers and can make all the changes you desire, without firing up PowerShell or making one-by-one changes in the TAC.
Sure, you can still access the TAC if you wish to, but without needing to subscribe to Teams Premium, you have all the functionality of policy packages (and more) when you connect to Orto.
Once you’re connected and are having fun (well, more fun than constant manual changes), you can even start experiencing the benefits of Microsoft Teams automated provisioning.
With the creation of user personas, you no longer need to spend time toing and froing when new users discover they need extra access. Instead, they automatically get assigned their Teams policies and access when you configure their profile in Entra (Azure AD).
Further Reading: We Created A Single Pane Of Glass For Microsoft Teams Management
Conclusion: Automated provisioning for Teams is a must
It’s easy for me to sit here and type up the benefits of automated provisioning. After all, I’m being paid to do so and I’ve been embedded in this business for 16 months now.
But there’s a reason I took this gig in the first place.
It’s because I have experienced the pain and embarrassment of making provisioning issues first hand. For 10 years, I was the person pressing the buttons. And you know what, I was very good at my job.
Yet, I was still prone to making manual errors because it’s the nature of provisioning.
There’s a lot of data entry involved. There’s a lot of copy and pasting. There’s a lot of running other peoples’ scripts and programs that I didn’t have any control over.
If I could turn back the clock and have a chance at making Teams provisioning seamless and error-free, I’d grab it with both hands. I’d look a ton better, get more done, and save my business money.
My boss would echo that sentiment. Tasked with streamlining the provisioning operations, he’d be first in the queue.
So, take your ticket, wait in line, and book a demo of Orto to see how much time and effort you could save with automation.
