How long do you think you spend provisioning users on Microsoft Teams?
Now, how long do you think you should spend provisioning users on Microsoft Teams?
Next, divide that by…
Only joking.
But what if there was a way to make provisioning Teams users genuinely more efficient?
You’d bite my hand off, right?
In that case, good news!
We built Callroute to help you provision users more efficiently in Teams!
Here’s the rundown of what Callroute helps you achieve:
1 – Create personas ready to apply when a new user joins
Process and consistency are the two main ingredients for successful change within an organization. Without either, IT administration and business operations descend into chaos.
Callroute helps you define your processes and achieve consistency in your Microsoft Teams user provisioning needs by enabling you to create Teams policy and configuration packages, called user personas.
A user persona contains all the Teams user policies and phone number requirements a user needs depending on their job role within your organization. Simply create a user persona that matches each of your user types within your organization and apply them in one click to the required users.
Each persona can contain up to 38 different Microsoft Teams user policies as well as a phone number from either Direct Routing, Operator Connect, or Microsoft Calling Plan ranges.
Applying a Callroute persona to a user is a single-click process that takes you just a few seconds. By comparison, performing the same actions in the Teams Admin Center would take you the best part of 10 minutes to complete.
Callroute user personas will literally save you hours of work a day.
You may also like: You Could Save $500,000 Using This Microsoft Teams Provisioning Tool
Of course, you may say “Teams has Policy Packages”, and you’re right. However, Policy Packages in Teams is a Premium licensed feature that will set you back $12pupm.
With Callroute, you get to use user personas for FREE for all your Teams users.
If you have 1,000 users in your organization, that alone will save you a whopping $144,000 a year on license costs, never mind the hours saved on IT admin tasks in addition.
Using Callroute user personas allows you to drive consistency through each of your user changes and combined with our intuitive, easy-to-use portal, promotes a process that is hard to deviate from.
The result is that your users receive the correct Teams experience the first time and do not need to raise an IT support ticket.
Everyone’s a winner.
2 – Change job roles in a single click
User change is not all about joiners. People move between departments and roles as part of their natural career progression. When they move, they may need different Teams settings to support their new role.
Without Callroute personas, you have to change up to 38 different Teams policies for the user using the Teams Admin Center. Maybe you have a script for this to make it a little easier. But, with scripts, they need to be fed information. So, you may have to prepare a CSV file or enter in the policy names you want to change to for each policy.
From experience, this is a time-consuming job that takes longer than a new joiner process. Knowledge of the process of change is also not easily transferrable. There may only be one or two people in your organization with enough business and technical implementation to know how to make the change. If they are busy, or on holiday, the whole business suffers.
Fortunately, using Callroute user personas, you can easily migrate a user from one persona to another by selecting a new persona from your list and applying it to the user. The process takes just a few seconds and can be performed by anyone.
Let’s go one step further. When you need to bulk update user policies for a group of users, how long does that take?
For instance, perhaps you need to change the meeting policy for all your sales team.
In the Teams Admin Center, you need to change the meeting policy for each affected user. Time gets eaten up while you search for the user by name, then apply the meeting policy change.
If that team consists of 10 people, that change would take approximately 30 minutes for a well-skilled admin user to perform.
You then must prepare a script (if you have the skills yourself), but still have to collate the data to feed into the script, the user identity and the policy name.
Callroute’s user persona tool has a “Persona Migration” tool that provides you with two options.
- Find the existing persona applied to the sales users, change the meeting policy and then save and apply the change to all affected users
or
- Clone the user policy to a new version and then use the persona migration tool to move users from the old persona to the new one
3 – Keep all your numbers in one place
If you use Microsoft Teams Phone, you know there are three main ways to connect your phone numbers to Teams.
- Direct Routing
- Microsoft Calling Plan
- Operator Connect (including Operator Connect Mobile / Teams Phone Mobile)
While Microsoft Calling Plan and Operator Connect numbers show in the Teams Admin Center, Direct Routing numbers do not.
This means that if you’re using Direct Routing, you still must maintain an external database of your number ranges and allocations. This will likely be an Excel workbook that is manually updated.
Even if you use Operator Connect or Calling Plans, the Teams Admin Center lacks basic number management features which makes it hard for IT admins to manage numbers. Search is slow, filtering is poor, and it lacks the ability to categorize or reserve numbers.
How much time do you waste trying to find the phone number you need to apply to a user?
I bet it adds up to hours a week.
Callroute has built-in number management for all number types. We allow you to synchronize your Calling Plan and Operator Connect numbers to your portal and group them by city or area code and type. Alongside these, you can add your Direct Routing number ranges, giving you a single pane of glass to manage all your numbers.
When synchronizing users, Callroute automatically updates phone number assignments across all number ranges, so even if a change is made directly in Teams, your number database is kept up to date automatically.
In addition, you can tag numbers to classify them based on your own criteria. You can search and filter these tags across ranges so you can easily find the numbers you need. Numbers can have multiple tags and you can color code them for easy identification.
What’s the catch?
Let’s be real for a second. There’s always a catch.
Here are the most common questions we get when people ask about our auto-provisioning tool:
- Q1: How much time do I need to invest upfront?
- A1: Setting up Callroute only takes a few minutes. However, you will need to invest some time into preparing your Azure AD data and understanding the different user personas needed in your organization. This time depends on your own circumstances. But we can help you with this.
- Q2: Will you pass our security audit?
- A2: Our system has built-in RBAC and MFA controls. We are happy to complete any DPA or security assessment. We are also ISO:27001 and ISO:9001 certified.
- Q3: How does the pricing work?
- A3: Our provisioning solution is priced per annum based on your business size.
- Q4: What if we haven’t audited our numbers and licenses?
- A4: If you use our auto provisioning solution, we do not charge for number management. This is included in your provisioning license. You purchase provisioning based on the total number of Teams users in your organization. This will determine what pricing bracket you fall in to. When you sync your Teams tenant to Callroute, we see how many users you have. Pricing brackets have a lot of scope for variation. If you go over a pricing bracket, we will let you know. But your service will not stop.
If you have any other questions about provisioning users more efficiently, we’d be happy to field them.
