Legacy PBX Replacement & Migration: Considerations for moving to Teams Voice

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Introduction

Today, many companies face a split between their voice platform and business systems. In many organisations, voice resides on legacy technology, sometimes cloud-based but often on-premise, poorly integrated into the organisation’s other communications systems.

This guide looks at how organisations can move beyond this split between voice and business systems, and bring all their business communications together onto modern cloud-based collaboration tools that give organisations new advantages in agility and business insight.

The guide describes the practical steps required to make this happen and outlines the methodology that has helped some of the world’s leading organisations integrate their voice communications into their overall business and enterprise workflow systems.

Voice Matters

Voice matters. Being the most important real-time communication channel, it results in more efficient and faster decision-making. It is also often the main way organisations communicate with their customers, enabling them to resolve problems quickly and efficiently. No organisation can afford to keep its voice communications on outdated, and in some cases, unsupported technology, isolated from all the other communication channels that organisations now rely on.

Over the last decade, voice has been supplemented with new channels including messaging and video for both internal and external communications.

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At the same time, collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams have brought new capabilities in business communications, knowledge management, and workgroup collaboration. Microsoft Teams helps organisations work far more effectively and rapidly.

A key advantage of integrated workflow and communications systems, such as Microsoft Teams, is that group members can work from any location and yet still be fully effective and in touch with all team activities and projects.

The Covid pandemic highlighted that the ability for team members to work effectively from home is essential for all organisations, and in its wake the trend of hybrid working has shown that many team members will continue to work from home several days a week, if not permanently.

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Teams Direct Routing

Organisations using Microsoft Teams, can completely replace legacy voice systems with the telephony features in Teams and Teams Direct Routing is one of the most flexible ways of doing this. Solutions, such as Resonate’s Voice for Teams platform, include a comprehensive, enterprise-grade product that provides full telephony functionality with service levels and 24x7x365 support.

Such solutions provide a globally available, feature-rich platform that is proactively monitored for voice quality, and possesses unparalleled security.

Teams Direct Routing is ideal for:

  • Organisations that are looking to retire legacy or PBX solutions, migrate from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams for telephony
  • Office 365 users who want to enable the telephony functionality of Teams, or
  • Companies looking to enhance and simplify communications for workgroups working remotely

    Resonate has delivered Microsoft voice solutions at scale across a range of industries, including oil & gas, financial services, retail, and the public sector. For example:

    In the energy sector, they have delivered enterprise voice solutions that have included for one customer 150,000 users in over 1,000 sites across 50 countries.

    In one global project, a Microsoft voice solution resulted in cost savings of 60%; significant improvements in collaboration, mobility and flexible working; improved knowledge management and business intelligence; realisation of new technologies such as industrial workplace augmented reality (AR); and voice integration with core enterprise business systems.
LEARN MORE ABOUT DIRECT ROUTING
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Endpoint Mapping

In order to capture the considerable potential cost savings and efficiencies that moving voice communications to Teams can realise, the customer needs to clearly understand the features and functionality of their legacy voice estate. With hot-desking and remote working, as well as the proliferation of different voice technologies and endpoints in the workplace and outside of it, most enterprises have ended up with a confusing range of voice endpoints.

The features and functionalities of these legacy voice systems needs to be mapped to the equivalent functions within Teams. This mapping process, done correctly, allows customers to optimise their savings and greatly reduces cost of change and project timelines. The endpoint mapping methodology should be designed to simplify the customer journey to unified communications with Teams through a clear roadmap that identifies difficulties, challenges, and opportunities from the outset.

Organisations need an approach that is based on a clear business-focused methodology with defined benefits that are tracked and monitored throughout the migration process.

At the heart of the best solutions on the market is the concept of endpoint mapping and management. Mapping voice endpoints is essential to smooth migration, avoiding disruption, and obtaining rapid returns from the migration from legacy voice to comprehensive unified enterprise communications.

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Process

The simplest, most obvious enterprise voice endpoints are items such as desk phones, ATA adapters, or conference phones. Increasingly, endpoints can also be found in software environments. Softphones and UC clients can give workers ways to communicate through any hardware devices that might be present, including desktop computers, smartphones, laptops, tablets, or even stand-alone workplace headsets. These ‘soft’ endpoints can be physically in an office, but can also be home-based or mobile.

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Typically, enterprises will have a mix of voice technologies connecting these endpoints to a PBX, ranging from hard-wired, including analogue lines, and emergency phones, as well as IP, soft endpoints, Wi-Fi and DECT.

Seek out a solution with a unique data collection and analysis process to assist in enterprise endpoint mapping. These will provide templates and methods for capturing information on all active connections and mapping these to Microsoft Teams.

Resonate have evolved their endpoint mapping process over many years proving and refining it in action – having addressed over 500 sites using this methodology. They have the capability to analyse site data and define personas, establish Design Ground Rules, assign correct connection types, and identify questionable connections for further interrogation.

Such solutions create Teams Endpoint Mapping (TEMAP) output for each site/PBX, which is reviewed with the site contact for agreement. They will then make adjustments as required, and agree on the final design.

The outputs of the process include:

Agreed Design Ground Rules and Final Assignment for all DIDs

Configuration information for identified special features

Requirements for any special feature development

Recommendations on the development of special features, such as whether it can be done inhouse, or requires a third party

Report for the final UCC solution, describing what is required in Teams to enable the removal of legacy equipment

A review of all findings and rationale

Resonate will identify the users that can easily move to Teams as well as other features such as common area and emergency lines, and map all these to their Teams equivalents.

The next step in the process is removing all hard phones and replacing office user desk phones with Teams. This involves replacing common area phones with Teams native phones, and providing UC analogue capability for emergency calls and other solutions that require PSTN analogue capabilities rather than digital. Resonate will carry out analysis and solutioning for exceptions and for enhanced PBX functions that must be replicated. Many sites have a small number of connections that are specialised. These are identified, managed and their functionality and use cases replicated in the Teams environment.

Enhanced PBX capabilities such as Voice Recording, Time Sensitive Forwarding, Call Centre Capability, and legal and regulatory constraints are also identified for each site and replicated in the Teams environment. Look for a provider that can develop solutions using Teams or third party products to migrate this type of functionality. They will be able to focus on the balance between user experience and cost to provide cost-effective solutions to meet enterprise needs.

All legacy features are re-implemented in the Teams environment. Your provider will validate that all features are mapped onto Teams, and once implemented, monitor on-site and with workgroups to ensure that all legacy features are working fully as expected. They will then decommission and dispose of the PBX, help remove all legacy equipment and can handle this through their own partners if necessary. They should also be able to handle all equipment disposal, either through your partners or through their own.

Benefits

Moving voice communications to a comprehensive unified communications solution within Microsoft Teams can achieve major cost savings, enhance teams’ agility, and integrate all the business and customer communications channels on a single, cloud-based platform that is available to your users, wherever they are in the world.

Resonate have developed an advanced, comprehensive solution that is designed to allow enterprises of every size to move their voice channels onto Teams efficiently and rapidly begin realising the major competitive and cost advantages that this can bring.

Our offering has been developed and enhanced over years of working with a number of the world’s largest companies in diverse and challenging locations.

Today, we can offer this solution to companies that want to move all their communications onto a modern, advanced platform and take advantage of the features and enhanced capabilities of enterprise unified communications.

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Teams Voice Tooling

Once companies have migrated their telephony to Teams, consideration needs to be given to how their new cloud voice service will be managed. Challenges to overcome include:

  • Managing and optimising phone numbers, number ranges and Microsoft Calling licences
  • Assigning, removing and changing voice policies for users
  • Running the PowerShell scripts required to make changes
  • Amending call queues and auto attendants – which require elevated access privileges and IT skills
  • Monitoring and understanding the route causes of any Teams voice quality issues

Resonate has developed Voice Tooling Solutions which can be added to any Teams Direct Routing service and provide automated solutions to such challenges.

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Talk to us

If you would like to discuss a PBX replacement or integration project and benefit from our extensive experience in complex projects and our industry-leading endpoint mapping process we would be happy to talk you through how we could help your business.

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