Microsoft Teams is leading the industry with a cloud collaboration platform that integrates the people, content and tools teams need to communicate successfully.

Teams is delivered in a complex maze of endpoints, network modalities and user scenarios, which has caused complications for enterprises during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nectar is leading the industry to help enterprises support and manage Teams, and this article will discuss Microsoft Teams, why it’s important, what can go wrong with it, and how to measure and improve on its use.

The Rise of Teams & Remote Work

Microsoft Teams has been on its way to becoming one of the industry-leading collaboration solutions for some time now.

In recent months, the impact of COVID-19 and the growing practice of social distancing resulted in a massive increase in work-from-home scenarios. Microsoft has seen an even more dramatic increase in the use of their Teams platform.

According to a recent Statista report, Teams has a predicted growth of 275% forecasted for 2020. As of March 2020, the number of daily active users amounted to 44 million. There seems no doubt that Microsoft Teams will soon smash the 50 million user threshold.

Nobody could predict the COVID-19 pandemic was going to happen, but with many workers and enterprise teams forced to work remotely indefinitely, they had to quickly adopt a collaboration tool. That said, issues can and have arisen with deploying Teams or any other collaboration tool in a rushed environment, for several reasons.

What Can Go Wrong With Teams

While Microsoft Teams has proven a valuable tool to enterprise end-users, the rushed transition to the cloud during the pandemic has left IT Operations and Support teams with a lack of visibility into user experience.

Microsoft’s basic dashboards and reporting provide some high-level insights, but troubleshooting and user-level diagnostics remain challenging tasks for many enterprises. Complicating the situation, most enterprises are also deploying Microsoft Teams Direct Routing, which connects on-premise carrier telephony to Microsoft’s cloud.

This Direct Routing traffic represents all inbound and outbound PSTN calls, often the most important calls for most businesses. Many organizations are turning to Nectar to help address the gap in visibility they’re experiencing with Microsoft’s built-in tools.

How to Measure & Move Forward

While everyone was left scrambling back in March, the dust has begun to settle and enterprises are embracing what is to become our “new normal”.

Many organizations, such as Twitter, are planning to allow many of their employees to work from home indefinitely. That means their IT teams will need to be more equipped than ever to handle remote work, and a piecemeal plan just to keep the lights on will not get the job done long-term.

One of the primary ways Nectar can help is with our monitoring and network assessment tools known as Perspective. Perspective creates a healthy UC Environment and provides visibility with key voice quality and video metrics for the cloud, which ultimately leads to great user experiences.

Webinar: Advanced Troubleshooting and Analytics for Microsoft Teams

Nectar has been monitoring remote workers for over ten years, as well as Microsoft UC platforms since their inception. On June 24th at 12 pm EST, Nectar Solution Architect, Ken Lasko, will be hosting a webinar to discuss advanced troubleshooting and analytics for Microsoft Teams.

In this webinar, Ken will address the following related to Teams and Nectar:

• Advanced PSTN Call Troubleshooting capabilities
• Monitoring SBC health and availability for Teams Direct Routing
• Powerful media and signaling analysis for PSTN calls to and from Microsoft’s cloud

If you’re interested in attending the session or receiving a recording of it after, please follow this link to register. To learn more about Nectar for Teams, or any of our other products, services and solutions, you may contact us through our website.