Martello recently commissioned EMA to conduct an entirely independent exploration of the state of Microsoft 365 and how enterprises are managing its performance and user experience in today’s modern workplace. With special attention given to Microsoft Teams, EMA set out to gauge the criticality, impact, performance, management, challenges, and best practices of Microsoft 365.

The work landscape has changed dramatically over the past two years and it has been a challenge for an organizations IT teams to keep the workforce connected. For many businesses, Microsoft Teams has become a core part of their efforts to keep connected but supporting the Microsoft Teams infrastructure has been something many IT departments have had to learn on the fly. Pre-pandemic, businesses might have had thousands of employees working in a handful of offices.

Written by Microsoft MVP Nick Cavalancia. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the 2022 rollout of Mesh for Microsoft Teams as the next step in online and virtual collaboration. This seemingly bold step forward into a new type of interaction between individuals is more a natural evolution, taking years of augmented reality research and applying it in a way that provides value to organizations wanting to better collaborate.

Within an organization, the Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security Operations Center (SOC) teams need to work together to maintain optimal network performance in addition to ensuring both overall security and the availability of IT services for business lines. In the past, these two teams were focused on two separate objectives, using different tools to do so and often running specific processes.

With Microsoft Teams usage continuing to increase, it was only a matter of time until we also saw the rise of Teams voice through PSTN. Even though this requires more expensive Microsoft 365 licenses, the return on investment can be significant purely based on the pricing structure but sizable savings can be realized when it comes to management overhead costs. However, it can be a challenge to ensure PSTN call quality for all your business lines and users.

Many organizations have become reliant on Microsoft Teams as the central hub of the digital workplace, allowing teams to work together more efficiently, amalgamating chat, file sharing, email, calendar, meetings, and integrations with countless third-party solutions all in one place. With this reliance comes the need for 24/7 reliability, so that users can stay productive on Microsoft Teams.

The IT department of an organization is tasked with helping maintain the productivity of their Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 services, facilitating effective service delivery for all users. The executives of the business (VIPs) are sensitive to optimized performance as they must regularly conduct very important calls and meetings.

When using Microsoft 365 services the main benefit of having a monitoring tool that can assess performance quality and identify issues is that it sends alerts into a ticketing tool such as ServiceNow for example, to initiate the process of remediating the problem. When you don’t have a monitoring tool in place then support tickets aren’t automatically sent and users must identify issues and send in tickets manually with little to no information on where the problem came from.

The phrase “Teams is slow” means that somewhere something isn’t working. But who in the organization should lead the charge to address the problem – especially when the problem isn’t Teams? This blog will examine the different information barriers in Microsoft Teams and how to overcome them.

Providing an effective service – especially in a world with constantly evolving needs – goes beyond standard operating hours. Imagine if a bank only kept your investments secure while they were ‘open’ during their hours of standard operation? Issues can arise at any time and having effective service delivery monitoring and support for enterprise’s IT teams and managed service providers is critical.