How much time do you spend on user provisioning in Microsoft Teams?
Wait, let’s rephrase…
How much time do you think you lose provisioning users in Microsoft Teams?
That much, huh?
So, how about we do something about that. Let’s talk about automating all your user provisioning in Teams, so you can spend your time doing things less menial.
But hold on. You’re good at your job and you don’t want your boss to think you’re slacking off by automating processes.
Good point. Nobody wants to be replaced by a robot. So, that’s why we’re going to show you how to automate user provisioning in Teams and introduce some things you can be spending your time on instead (trust me, stick around for these).
What is automated user provisioning?
Automated user provisioning is exactly what it says on the tin. Take the manual processes you do time and again, like configuring accounts for new starters, countless moves, adds, and changes, and deleting licenses for people who leave at a moment’s notice.
Instead, you create user personas, rules, and triggers, so that when someone new starts, they are automatically provisioned based on their job role, their location, or whatever characteristics you choose.
Think of all the time you’ll save every time 50 new sales staff join your company. Or when the entire marketing team takes a sabbatical.
And let’s be honest. You know that time when you made a manual error? When a lapse in concentration meant hours of reconfiguration. Automation removes all that too.
How to automate user provisioning in Microsoft Teams
First up, you’re going to need access to Callroute’s auto-provisioning tool.
Once you’re ready to roll, here’s the process for automating user provisioning.
1 – Create user personas
Before you can automatically provision users, you must first configure some baseline settings you want to apply to users during provisioning. You do this using our user persona feature.
A user persona is a set of policies and configurations that have been created to meet the business needs of your users depending on their job role. For instance, a person in the ales department won’t have the same needs as someone in finance.
By creating a persona for each department, or job function, you can assign the right set of configurations and policies to your users consistently.
Callroute uses the Teams policies you have already created in the Teams Admin Center. All you need to do is synchronize those policies to Callroute, then create your user personas in our portal. You can have as many personas as necessary to meet your needs.
You can assign up to 38 different Microsoft Teams policies in each persona, from dial plan, meeting, calling, and message policies. In addition, you can choose a number from a defined number range(s) to give to a user matching a persona.
In the below example, we have created a UK Sales persona for our sales team members that applies the London dial plan, sales meeting policy, and a phone number from our London office range.
Once you have built your personas, you are ready to build your automations.
2 – Preparing your Azure AD
For Callroute to assign the correct user persona to your users, it must be able to identify them and their job function. It does this by synchronizing users and their metadata from your Azure AD.
Each user object in Azure AD contains information about a user and their function within your organization. The types of metadata include:
- Job Title
- Department
- Country
- Office
- City
Making sure this information is accurate and up to date will enable Callroute to assign the right user persona to the right user, first time.
If your Azure AD metadata is not up to date, we can help you identify the root cause, rectify, and implement successful processes to ensure that your Azure AD data remains accurate, now and in the future.
Once your Azure AD information is accurate, you can then build automation rules by using the values of the metadata as rule conditions.
3 – Automation rules
Now that your Azure AD user information accurately represents what each user does within your organization, you can now begin to build your automation rules.
You should build a rule for each of your user personas. When created, the first matching rule is applied to a user.
In our example we want users of the London sales office to be provisioned with the UK Sales persona.
Step 1 – Create a new automation and name it something easily understandable, in our case, “UK London Sales Team”. At this point, you can provide an optional description for more context.
Step 2 – Add conditions that Callroute will look for to decide if a user matches the user persona. These conditions are built from the user metadata found in Azure AD. In our example, we want the following conditions:
Job Title = “Sales” AND City = “London”
You can also use OR logic.
This might be useful if the Sales team is in different cities, but all require the same set of Teams policies and phone numbers from the same range.
Step 3 – Choose the user persona to apply to the users. In our case “UK Sales”.
Save everything and let Callroute do the rest.
4 – Sit back and relax
Now that your automation has been created, the next time Callroute synchronizes with your Microsoft Teams tenant, users matching this rule will be provisioned with the configured user persona.
By default, this occurs once every hour. You can trigger provisioning manually by performing a user synchronization.
That’s it! You’ve created everything you need to automate user provisioning for new and existing Teams users.
Next, onto the important stuff.
What can I do with all my spare time?
Here are a few things we thought you might like to do, now that you’ve got unlimited time on your hands.
Audit your Teams tenant
Got tons of unused channels and teams that you have no idea if anyone will use them again? Now you have time to conduct an audit and give people 30 days fair warning before they’re deleted.
Introduce Teams best practices across the board
Annoyed that Dave in accounts is always @ messaging the entire team when the message could have been a DM to Suzie? Now you have time to communicate how different components should be best-used.
Take your next Microsoft exam
Exam MS-700: Managing Microsoft Teams is choice exam for Teams admins. But you could also use your spare time to brush up on old skills or learn something new to further your career.
Attend Commsverse
2023 was the biggest Commsverse, the biggest Microsoft Teams event in the UK, and attendees are already expecting great things from next year. If you’re in the UK and into Teams, it’s the place to be.
Create your Teams onboarding checklist
When a new employee joins your company, how long does it take to get them truly onboarded to Teams? Longer than you’d like, huh? Use our Microsoft Teams onboarding checklist for inspiration.
But, seriously, auto-provisioning…
It’s a game-changer for Teams admins everywhere.
Whether you have 500 or 500,000 Teams users, there are countless (literally) pros to automation.
We categorize them into two headline areas:
- Saving time
- Reducing manual errors
But, when you dig deep into how much time and how many errors, the concept of automating user provisioning becomes a no-brainer.
