Automated Transcript
Jack Carr, Team Leader Solutions Consultant: Welcome back to Gammabox, my name is Jack Carr. I’m joined by Tom Hunter, and today we’re going to be bringing you more Microsoft Teams updates. But hang around, we’re going to be trying something a little bit different following on from that. First up, we’re going to be talking about some of the updates from Teams Phone, meetings and collaboration. So, I’ll kick us off. First point that Microsoft have released is DR number management – DR being Direct Routing – and this is starting to bridge the gap because we know there is a difference between how you would administrate your phone numbers within the experience of Direct Routing versus how you do it for Operator Connect and Microsoft’s own calling plans. The new platform is going to allow us to upload unused or unassigned phone numbers on Direct Routing. You can do this via a CSV file, and that means you can have a closer experience. From what we’ve seen, it doesn’t look necessarily the exact same, but what it does get rid of is keeping track of your phone numbers and where they’re allocated in an offline spreadsheet. We’ve seen some frustrations around that – it can lead to manual errors, it can lead to a bit of frustration when provisioning things like new users or joiners and leavers from a business, making sure phone numbers are still routed to the appropriate place if you are doing a bit of a refresh and a bit of a migration from one platform to another. So, what we’re seeing is it’s moving in the right direction. It’s hopefully going to give us a bit more ease of life – more an IT administrator – probably the end user is never going to know about it, never going to see it. The phone rings, that’s great. But for IT admins, it should make quite a big difference there.
Tom Hunter, Solutions Consultant: So, it’s a bit of a half step then in that case, is it more that, rather than like you say having it on a spreadsheet, you’ve got it within the admin centre itself, but it’s not quite as intuitive as doing it as you would with Operator Connect where it’s a GUI and it’s a simple couple of button presses and you’re enabled with?
Jack: Yeah, from what we’ve seen so far – we’ve seen limited information thus far, this is quite a recent announcement – but it doesn’t necessarily look like quite the same interface. But it is a way of managing an asset list within the Teams admin centre for Direct Routing where it just wasn’t possible before that point. So definitely moving in the right direction. Whether it’s going to get fully on par with Operator Connects, I guess watch this space. But we know that there is effort on the Microsoft side to kind of bring them a bit more in parallel.
Tom: Yeah, that’s a fair point. And anything that is going to make it easier for admins to do their job and keep track of things – and if it stays within the Microsoft ecosystem that they’re already going to be using anyway – that’s not a bad thing. So, I’ve got a couple of Teams updates as well. First of which being delaying simultaneous ring. Now, sounds simple on paper, right? So, if you’re part of an organisation that has simultaneous ring enabled, what this new feature does is – as it says on the tin – allows you to disable that simultaneous ring for a configured number of seconds. So essentially, rather than doing as I’ve said exactly what it says on the tin – simultaneous ring, ringing everybody all at once – it will basically ring the intended recipient first and then, again, like I say, a configurable number of seconds later it will bounce to the next person if that call isn’t answered by person number one. So really what this does is for businesses looking to maybe move back into the office and things like that, and more sort of busy environments where there’s lots of people trying to work and things like that, this small change can reduce things like noise pollution – if you want to call it like that – within the office space and also minimise distractions as well. There’s nothing worse than if you’ve got 5 to 10 people on a simultaneous ring and every single one of them blows up at the same time. You’d rather have it at least one, two, and so forth. So, it delays it a little bit, so hopefully a productivity booster as well.
Jack: Yeah, and what we’re not talking about with that is it’s not a call queue, right? It’s maybe two users who fulfil the same responsibilities. And if someone is away from their desk or is unable to take a call straight away, it gives at least a chance for them to get that call – it is for their own number – so at least they get an opportunity to answer that before it goes to the next person.
Tom: And it’s not going to cause too many issues there. Yeah, stuff like customer services and things like that where you probably would have that sort of scenario is probably quite good for them. And like I say, coming back into the office – you kind of want it to be going from working from home where you’ve essentially only got the dog barking every 5 minutes or something like that – to full-blown calls all over the place. You kind of want to ease people back into that sort of environment and make it more comfortable and easy to work in as well. So next, the default policy for transcription has been updated from off to on for any new tenants, which also aligns with the default transcription policy that is with call recording as well. So, for tenants that haven’t set up global policies or anything like that, that transcription policy will be changed to on by default. What this change doesn’t mean is that meetings will automatically have transcription enabled. However, what it does mean is that transcriptions will be available by default for users to turn off and on if required. So essentially, the policy means that the transcription feature is available for everybody, but it’s not automatically turned on by default in the meeting itself – it doesn’t automatically go on when you join. So, it’s more of… it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. But what are your thoughts on that?
Jack: Do you know what I think, right? I think everybody is going crazy for transcripts in a minute. Everybody’s going crazy for transcripts, AI summaries of transcripts—
Tom: You said it, you said the word.
Jack: I did, yeah. And if I’m honest, I think we’re going to see loads of people not turn up to calls anymore because we’re doing such a good job of being able to get all the information you need from a meeting without spending an hour of your life in that meeting. The problem is, it’s a slippery slope, right? Because if everybody takes that approach, nobody’s in the meeting, nobody’s talking, there’s nothing to transcribe or summarise.
Tom: Yeah, that’s true. It can be countered though if there was something that, for example, reviewed sentiment on calls and things like that. So, your manager got a report at the end saying Tom was on this call, camera off the entire time, muted, compared to Jack who was on camera, smiling, contributing, etc. There’s kind of a give and take.
Jack: Goodness me, we’ve been treated to some updates this month. These are riveting, game-changing updates from Microsoft. We very much thank them for it. So, with that, I’ll take over to the last Teams update we have today, which is adding agents or bots into one-to-one Teams chats now. So, if you have a job role where you might have to do a level of repetitive tasks – information get, information give, repetitive FAQs – that’s something that potentially we can add a bit of quality of life there to end users. Spoke about how we can add a bit of quality of life to the admin side, it’s nice to see it going to the end users as well. Ultimately, that’s going to be the perception of an organisation of a new technology being put in – is around what the end user experience is. So once added to a one-to-one chat, a bot can be activated and prompted by anyone in that chat – doesn’t just need to be the person that put it in. So, something by using the app key and then typing in the bot’s name, you can ask it some questions and see what it can give you. It’s probably not going to replace anybody by any means, but simple prompts and basic tasks is what Microsoft have described its functionality as. So yeah, we’ll be able to see if that can take a little bit of the workload that needs maybe less of a human touch on it.
Tom: Yeah, and for that, what sort of data is it actually giving out? Is it data that’s been fed into it by Microsoft itself, so you ask Microsoft-specific questions? Do you need to manually configure what’s in there?
Jack: It’s a very good point. So, by going into one-to-one chat, it should be able to find you things like files shared between those individuals in the past, messages said, that sort of thing. I’m not sure how much the reach this goes. I know we can’t add bots to things like Teams themselves and Teams channels, so whether it fulfils all the same function as those – it probably needs a little bit of testing. But I guess that’s probably why you’d add it to the chat, not the channel itself, right?
Tom: Yeah, no absolutely. I think the way that people can go with hearing about bots and things like that is it’s like a ChatGPT or something like that that is a source of all knowledge. But realistically, it’s more of almost like a glorified search bar essentially to find specific things that you’re looking for and basically bring all of that together in something that’s easier to digest than trolling through things that it could be.
Jack: So that comes to the end of our Teams update for today. There wasn’t, admittedly, a massive amount to go through today. So, one of the other things that we wanted to touch on was we want to call out some of the challenges that we perceive from our customers – being a supplier – and what we’re calling that is the CIO Help Squad, right? We know that it’s a very challenging role and we’ve seen some commonality in the challenges that our CIOs face. If we called out every challenge, this episode would be a matter of hours, not minutes. So, we’re going to summarise it a little bit – summarise using human intervention, not AI – and we’re going to call out some of the more prominent ones. So, I wanted to talk on the concept of managing multiple suppliers, and the challenge here has a few layers that we can pull back. They’re ranging from commercially, to operationally, to even just a matter of trust, right? So that real human element there – making sure you’re being looked after by the right people who understand you as a business. Now across technology, we’re seeing a consolidation of how they interact with each other. It’s very rare now that you can have one technology that doesn’t interact with any other part of your estate – it’s just not really possible with a cloud-based strategy. It’s all relying on other bits and bobs within your estate, and the reality is they need to be supplied by someone. And if you have multiple suppliers, you’re going to get into potentially some sticky situations. Often these will have staggered end dates, so you might be paying for one service you’re moving away from, and paying for another that’s there to be the underlying connectivity or voice infrastructure to deliver that when you’ve moved to another platform. You risk having unaligned service level agreements and support processes, which obviously has a tangible element to that there. And historically, there has been a theory that having multiple suppliers reduces your business risk. To a point, yeah, I definitely understand that. But in practice, that might not quite be the case. Not saying it’s a blanket statement, but it may very well not be. Having a consolidated supplier strategy will help your supplier at the end of the day, right? And that’s not because you are just spending more money with them – I’m sure they’ll appreciate you for that – but what it does is, by having more of your estate with them, it means that they can have increased visibility of your estate. So, it allows them to address any issues that do arise quicker from that visibility. And what that means to you is it reduces any impact to your business in the event that something does go wrong. And that’s not even mentioning the economies of scale that you might well see if you were to procure more than one service from a single provider.
Tom: No, I totally agree. And I think it’s worth noting that some of these points will bleed into one another. Just looking at my notes here, I’ve definitely highlighted this point as well. But no, I think you’re right and I think it’s a good – it’s an interesting point – having multiple suppliers potentially de-risking part of the business or technology stack. I don’t see how that’s possible if you are relying on multiple people doing multiple things and any one of these plates could drop at any one time. It seems like the right thing to do to go with one person who is managing absolutely everything. I guess it’s putting all your eggs in one basket, but again like you say, you’ve got that full visibility across the solution itself, and if you procure multiple solutions across the actual stack, so yes, you are putting your eggs in one basket, However, is that less risky than trying to spin 100 plates?
Jack: I suppose it’s contextual, isn’t it? I mean, yes, if you can have one supplier it really needs to be the right supplier, doesn’t it?
Tom: Yeah, that’s it, definitely. That comes into another point where managing multiple suppliers if they are all amazing is no problem at all. There’s no issue if there’s no issue. But managing multiple suppliers where one is an issue, that kind of jeopardises the other components, because if one supplier providing a critical part doesn’t do their part, the other parts are pretty much useless if that supplier does have an issue that it takes longer than normal to solve or something along those lines.
Jack: Yeah, it’s all wrapped together. That’s how your phone system sits with your contact centre, how they’re delivered over your wide area network, and of course, how do you keep it all secure as well right?
Tom: Yeah exactly. The four pillars, or three pillars. So, from my perspective again, like I said, they might bleed into each other a little bit, but if anything, that kind of highlights the point that they are all equally important and have a knock-on effect on each other. So first point for me is not dead ending your technology stack, so something that’s really important to take into account for CEOs is being conscious to not dead end your technology stack. Now, what does that mean? So, by dead ending, I mean ensuring that you are looking at future proof solutions, has the ability to scale as the business does, again, whether that’s up or down. These are odd times, there’s a lot of change in the environment post COVID. You need to be able to scale one way or the other and make sure that that doesn’t cause any or minimises any sort of both business impact and also financial impact as well. Now, this is where we can start to look at things like a consumption model. So, having a partner provide it as a service versus that more manual on premise traditional way of doing things where things are manually self-managed or potentially internally or be a third party like you mentioned with the multiple suppliers, and the most important thing just now, and what we’ve the biggest thing we’ve seen from COVID, is accelerated is a lot of organisations having this cloud first strategy. So, cloud solutions by their nature provide that scalability and flexibility, that’s just the way it is, and with organisations needing to not dead end their solutions, the cloud seems to be the way to go, because it takes into consideration and almost alleviates those two points. So, when you compare things like on premise, where like you say, you maybe have to do things like manual changes to SBCs or technology for example, or call up an existing supplier to add additional SIP capacity for example as well. Troubleshooting fixes and things like that, all of these issues are where ideally you’ll be looking for essentially a single supplier as you’d see, who can provide an as a service model, and again with that, you’re doing things and moving to the cloud anyway and not dead ending your technology. You’re doing things like offloading issues to a single supplier, who rather than keeping it internally and relying on internal experience, which is pretty volatile. If you’ve got people who leave, people who join, training etc, you’re offloading those issues to a single supplier who does have that wealth of knowledge with these solutions themselves, and basically can manage each of the components as part of the service. Things like proactive monitoring of the entire solution, again we’ve discussed around not dead ending your technology. If you have your site as a single point of failure, and compared to having a partner who can provide that sort of proactive monitoring and managing where they can see a problem before you do, and actively look for an issue before you even potentially know, it’s there providing things like little bonuses like, for example again, scaling is potentially one of the big issues a CIO might face within that business and their technology stack as it is just now. So, a supplier that could maybe provide again, as an example, some sort of burst limit for SIP where, yes, you will need to scale up, but you don’t lose service at the time of the increase. You just are basically renting or consuming something that you don’t own yet, but you will have to pay for it, and you will scale up accordingly, and then as you say, a provider who can give you that full technology stack as well. So, a single supplier who takes care of everything, you get the full visibility, and basically that sort of overarching support of the solution stack, not just a solution as a whole. So, what are your thoughts on that?
Jack: Well, I think there’s another element to the cloud first strategy that you might not have quite touched on explicitly. But organisations across both the public sector and the private sector, we know environmental sustainability is very high on priorities, and that does impact the CIO in terms of what they look at from a strategy perspective. If you took the time to look into the power draw, any consumption metrics around equipment that you have on premise today, versus what that would be moving to a cloud-based model, the actual financial side of it is one thing. You might see some benefits there, but just by reducing your footprint, we know that certain businesses are targeted against this, and we’re not saying that you’ll absolutely smash your ESG targets because you got rid of your PBX on site, or you move to a cloud first SD-WAN model, but it’s a step in the right way, and with those kinds of targets, it can’t be one nail to hammer and you’ve done it, right? It needs to be incremental gains across everything you do as a business, but it’s worth calling out that your technology stack can absolutely fall into that as well.
Tom: Yep, you’ve led perfectly into my next point here around basically the other key important point, and which is the understanding the ROI that certain technologies and solutions can provide you. So again, this is going to be a bit of a repeat of what you just said because you made a really great point there, but essentially we’re in a time just now where ideally we are looking for people who are moving from that on premise to a cloud first strategy. Now, this does come with some considerations, like you say, to the business and trying to navigate things such as cost. Now, that comes as part of ESG and the sort of energy consumption that you just mentioned there. So, while on the face of it, a managed or hosted solution, cloud-based solution, might be more expensive, that is just a fact on the face of it.
Jack: Could be.
Tom: It might not be. Spoiler alert, it might not be. Yeah, like I say, it could be more expensive potentially, but it’s not really painting the full picture when you’re comparing it to what you had previously as a traditional on premise solution that did have a lower cost for SIP channels, or for whatever it may be Yeah, it’s not painting the whole picture, and you are missing a really important key component, which is the savings you can make in other areas, as you mentioned rightly, around the ESG perspective and the sort of power consumption. So, a lot of businesses now, as you say, absolutely have a huge push towards ESG targets and objectives. Now taking that into account when purchasing a new solution is pretty vital in actually adding that extra piece of the puzzle to the sort of cost portfolio, if you will. So, for example, understanding like you say the carbon impact of an on-premise solution. Yeah, okay, fine, it might be quite carbon heavy, might actually have a pretty nasty carbon footprint, but bear in mind, that is on your premises. That is the cost that you incurring for that. Offload that to somebody who hosts a solution, a big organisation that hosts a solution with their own ESG targets, who can contribute more to helping with their own ESG targets, as in doing more for the environment, that takes the onus off you from an ESG side. You are reducing your carbon footprint, hitting your ESG objective, while also potentially saving money on the hidden costs. Like you say, the energy consumption, these things cost money to run. Do you want that offloaded to someone else, or do you want to take that on? It’s those sort of hidden costs that really need to be taken into account.
Jack: You don’t need that impact of doing such a thing. You don’t need to be technical in the slightest to know if you’ve made that kind of change, if you have a cupboard in your office, which services as your on premise data centre, everybody knows it’s there, because it’s the hottest part of the entire office. They are roasting through doors, and it’s pure wasted energy, just keeping it up.
Tom: Exactly. So, the point is, you take that off your premise for one. Your ESG targets are hit, because you’re removing that sauna from your actual premises and offloading it to someone who has even bigger saunas somewhere else, and hosting it, and like I say, yes, you may be paying a little bit more essentially, but you take into account the hidden costs and things like that, and also the benefits of the scalability, flexibility, the partner who’s going to manage it for you. Think of the cost of training and things like that, of training someone new coming in, or something. The time that people are using to support that when they could be supporting something else. Take all that into account, and I think you’ll find that the traditional model and the new cloud based model, they do balance out to a point, and there’s definitely a good argument to sort of suggest that cloud first is arguably the better solution overall for a number of reasons.
Jack: I would not say it’s just totally, you know, “not my monkeys, not my circus,” right, when it comes to decommissioning a data centre. But ask your suppliers about it—it should be an open conversation. Suppliers in this space, they have their own environmental policies. They should be able to back it up and demonstrate how they’re achieving these things. They should be able to provide you with documentation to say, “We adhere to these standards.” It’s not just saying, because we’re not omitting, that we’ve solved the problem. Do some checks. Ask your providers. Make sure that they’re in line with what you would adhere to in your own ESG policy. And that can flow onto your suppliers, not just you as a business. Excellent. And, you know, the couple of last points that I had around these challenges that can face a CIO’s workload. So, the first one I want to call out is making sure that you’re empowered to the point where you have control over a platform with the support of a specialist partner in the background there. I think control is a broad word—can be seen as a bit scary sometimes—but in our world what it boils down to is giving you as much access as you require, with as much support as you need. Ideally, what we want a customer to be is comfortable and knowledgeable in what they consume. We want them to fundamentally understand the technology that they’re consuming. I think that’s a recipe for success and can be a recipe for some frustration if they don’t—while still giving a guiding hand where needed. You need to have a provider who can scale both in knowledge and resource to support your environment while giving you the ability to self-manage. In the example of our customers, we’re absolutely there for support triages where required, but we acknowledge that day-to-day asks can be quite simple things with the right knowledge and resource. And what you really don’t want to do is lean into an SLA or a change when it can be something that is done within the platform yourself, as long as you’re supported by the right partner and enabled in the right way.
Tom: Yeah, definitely.
Jack: So, I think that’s definitely the way that we prefer it. It’s about picking a supplier that gives you that nice balance of control with support, I’d say.
Tom: Well, that’s it. It really depends on what said customer is actually looking for. And you’re absolutely right—you give them enough control without giving them the ability to potentially break something if they want to mess about with it. So yeah, we can guide in any way, shape, or form that they would like. We can provide assistance and potentially some information that they may not have access to on their own. But ultimately, yeah, you’re absolutely right. Keep the solution working and continuing to work because the parts that shouldn’t be played with are not getting played with. But again, sometimes things just don’t work. That’s the importance of having the proactive partner to manage and monitor these solutions for you. We’ve got the expertise to sort it out. If you recognise there’s an issue, we’re probably already in the middle of trying to fix it anyway. So yeah, I totally agree.
Jack: Good stuff. And the last point that I called out is one that we’ve touched on before, but it absolutely is—it does warrant having its own specific call out there—and it’s around having a secure environment. It’s a given in today’s world. Cyber security is now an absolute necessity. It’s a proper non-negotiable. And having a competent supplier who is either delivering you a managed security service or just has the appropriate security wraps around the product that they are delivering to you—that can be the difference between a business functioning as normal or potentially being in the headlines for the wrong reasons.
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, couldn’t give you the exact numbers just now—to be honest, you probably wouldn’t want to know them—but the number of cyber attacks and things like that, attempted cyber attacks or things of that nature on a day-to-day basis for certain organisations is terrifying. It’s terrifying. Especially now, when these malicious attacks are getting more sophisticated and smarter. You have to be so, so secure and careful with how you’re choosing your partner and making sure you’re covering all bases. Because, yeah, it’s scary. It just takes one to kind of shut you down for an extended period of time. And ultimately, that’s where things get a bit more complicated in trying to solve those issues.
Jack: Totally agree. So hopefully that was a quick run-through of the highlighted challenges. And, you know, like I said, we haven’t touched on every single one of them. If we were to do so, we’d be here all day. But yeah, hopefully that was a useful discussion.
Tom: I suppose there’s plenty more that might come out of this that we can talk more around. But like you say, we don’t want to be here all day. Thank you for joining us on this edition of Gammabox, with the addition of the CIO Help Squad. Keep an eye out for more episodes coming shortly.
