IT staff are continually being pulled in different directions, especially in large enterprises with complex deployments of collaboration hardware spread across time zones and geographies. On top of that, end user expectations for meeting equality are higher than ever with IT expected to accommodate and support different workstyles across many different workplaces. To further complicate matters, many customers end up stuck with multiple support contracts, with different expiry dates and some product purchases slipping through the net and not being covered at all.

We recently spent time talking with global enterprise customer IT Directors to better understand these pain points and worked with them to refine Poly+ to meet their unique needs. For large organizations, tracking and supporting numerous communication devices across multiple locations for high-scale deployments quickly becomes an arduous task.

Poly+ Enterprise

That is why we are proud to introduce Poly+ Enterprise – a turbo-charged version of our award-winning Poly+ support service. Poly+ Enterprise has been designed specifically with the large enterprise in mind and provides:

• Unlimited global priority 24/7 technical support with dedicated support number and unique PIN code – enabling rapid access to an assigned support team with ecosystem cloud partner support skills to accelerate case resolution.
• No need to track serial numbers – enterprise customers are assigned a single Master ID for their entire Poly estate.
• Advance hardware replacement – devices are replaced with pre-paid next business-day shipping to any hybrid working location, ensuring business continuity.
• Coverage for your entire Poly deployment – including automatic coverage as new devices are added along the way.
• Designated Poly Customer Success Manager – focused on making sure that all Poly service program activities are optimized for you.
• Enterprise integration and IT tools for maximum success – taking the strain off your IT team by providing a proactive position on monitoring and device management.
• Simple pricing per device category and an annual true-up process – enables blanket coverage for all devices across the enterprise and effortless forecasting and budgeting for annual planning.

These professional-grade benefits will remove the burden of day-to-day tracking and budgeting, providing the peace of mind and simplicity that end users crave. If a user requires support for their Unified Collaboration solution at two in the morning, no problem! Help is available 24/7. This hassle-free support service lets you focus on your priorities, optimizing your overall time management.

Contact your Poly representative for more information about Poly+ Enterprise and turbo-charge your support service today.

As employees return to the office, often adopting a hybrid working model, there is increasing pressure on IT to move beyond a break-fix model to keep teams at peak performance. Employees are relying on IT to help them be at their best, deliver results, stay in the flow and communicate effectively. Employees want to enjoy the experience of being back in the office with their co-workers, have the time to catch up and chat, and not worry about the technology in the meeting room they have booked.

Poly Remote Monitoring is designed for customers that want to provide proactive support to end-users. Even if you have the skillset to fix issues sometimes monitoring the status of meeting room devices can seem like a full-time challenge. Poly Remote Monitoring provides multi-vendor support and can monitor devices from leading vendors, including those that are native Zoom or Microsoft Teams. It’s a scalable, cloud-based, multi-tenant solution, based on ITIL framework and backed by global Poly services capabilities.

The service sets you up with data gathering tools that expertly monitor your collaboration and infrastructure environments and provides remote proactive and predictive monitoring to reduce outages so that you can concentrate on correcting and adjusting devices before problems occur. Poly will notify you of any potential problems and offer simple automated alerting and integration into your existing ticketing systems so you have time to resolve the issue before it causes any disruption to employees’ meetings.

There are three parts to our room-based Remote Monitoring platform which you can see in our 15-minute demonstration:

1. Dashboard that monitors current events and provides real-time information on the health of your organization’s collaboration devices – all devices, infrastructure, video, and audio endpoints. The dashboard includes a section that displays the top ten issues for you to be aware of, e.g. network latency or a problematic device that needs looking at.
2. Notifications that you can set up. You can configure alerts via email or via an optional ServiceNow integration – which sends you a notification if an issue is detected in real-time such as problems with memory, CPU utilization, packet loss or if the device is no longer reachable.
3. Reporting is created on demand and downloadable in Excel format and you can look at things such as availability, packet loss, unique events, a summary of your device estate, and utilization.

The Benefits of Remote Monitoring

• Significant cost reductions together with increased operational efficiency ‒ saves you the expense and complexity of building and managing an in-house built monitoring solution. Leverages Poly’s extensive experience in managing real-time communications systems and a rule set developed over a decade to eliminate false positives and just alert those issues which require attention.
• Ensures efficient network infrastructure control and management – monitor devices, networks and endpoints quickly and painlessly – you only need to get involved if there is a potential problem.
• Clear insights – dashboards providing advanced and intuitive reporting capabilities.
• 24×7 continuous monitoring in real-time – multiple locations provide you the flexibility to scale globally are all monitored using the same best practices and using the Poly remote team means that your own staff doesn’t have to be onsite 24×7.
• Reductions in time to resolve an incident ‒ your systems are remotely monitored and you are alerted of any potential problems with enhanced issue identification and information which you can then monitor more closely and take preventative/corrective action before it becomes a major issue.
• Improvements in customer satisfaction and adoption ‒ by being proactive you can save downtime and reduce end-user dissatisfaction; end users will be more likely to book office-based collaboration solutions if they have a seamless experience.
• Security – by using a locally hosted collector which sends traffic one way (outbound) only, the solution is inherently secure and is typically quickly approved by your IT Security team.
• Increased productivity ‒ The IT team can resolve issues more quickly and end users don’t have to report the issue and wait for it to be fixed, costing hours in productivity as the IT team is already on it and can reassign alternative meeting rooms/systems if required.

With 24/7 Poly Remote Monitoring, you are set up with the data gathering tools that expertly monitor your collaboration and infrastructure environments, enabling you to quickly get to the root of the problem and effectively resolve it.

Learn More

To see if Poly Remote Monitoring is the right managed service for you download our infographic, watch a one-minute introduction video, read our brochure, and learn more about the complete range of Poly Managed Services.

Microsoft Phone System is technology that enables call control and Private Branch Exchange (PBX) capabilities in the Office 365 cloud with Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Phone System works with Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business Online clients and certified devices. Phone System allows you to replace your existing PBX system with a set of features directly delivered from Office 365 and tightly integrated into the company’s cloud productivity experience.¹

If your company has decided to migrate from its current voice platform to Microsoft Teams, you may want to be all-in-the-Microsoft cloud for voice or connected to your own carrier. Maybe, you’ll have a mix between the two; needing to retain some functionality provided by your current on-premises PBX deployment while integrating part of your communications environment on Microsoft Phone System. Once you’ve made the decision to migrate, how do you proceed? Poly can help you take the next step and ensure your migration goes smoothly.

PLANNING THE MIGRATION JOURNEY

Are you ready to get started on the voice migration journey? With limited IT staff, you may be asking yourself, “What are the blind spots we aren’t experienced with? What are the risks to our business operations if there are issues with our migration to a Microsoft Phone System?”

Many organizations see the task of moving from their current PBX to Microsoft Phone System as daunting for the following reasons:

• the size of the project
• the time it will take
• lack of internal resources
• not having enough in-depth understanding and experience with Microsoft Phone system

However, it’s likely that your biggest fear is that during the process of migrating, mistakes will take your phone system down. Without the right help, it can take months to plan where to start – or even find the right tools.

HOW POLY CAN HELP

Any move from one PBX platform to another requires expertise, careful planning and the time to do so. Poly Professional Services is here to help. At Poly, we have skilled, technical experts, including Microsoft Most Valued Professionals, who are experienced with the unique challenges of planning, assessments, and deployments who can make your migration easier and faster. We can help you quickly assess and plan for a voice migration journey from your traditional IP based PBX solution to Microsoft Phone System.

TAKING THE FIRST STEP

Your first step is to assess and analyze what you have and what it would take to migrate to Microsoft Phone System. Our Poly PBX Assessment Service for Microsoft Teams is designed to ease your mind about this type of project. This service can help you maximize data integrity, minimize financial risk and free your internal resources to work on other projects—or more simply put, ensure a seamless migration.

This two-day remote service provides you with the necessary help to assess, analyze, and map the full configuration of your source PBX environment into an assessment summary report. Through understanding your needs, schedule, and business expectations, this service provides total transparency into this system(s) configurations of your PBX(s)—including user names and numbers, call flows, activated features, ring patterns, hunt and pickup groups, E164 normalization, voicemail, and more. At the end of the engagement we provide an assessment summary report which includes key insights; a full PBX review; end-users and extensions analysis; feature parity and device summary reports with breakdowns.

This level of information will help you accelerate the planning and migration assessment process significantly – taking days for an assessment rather than weeks/months.

OUR REPORT COVERS FOUR KEY AREAS:

1. Migration costing – specifying what can be migrated automatically and what will require manual work and resources.
2. Migration challenges outlook – providing the ability to know up-front where the migration challenges will be and address them specifically.
3. Detailed devices inventory and mapping – a critical aspect of evaluating a migration project is visibility of the devices in place, what needs to be replaced and what is enabled by employee profiles.
4. Unique data – the service assesses specific data sets with unique value in the legacy PBX, which can be analyzed per request.

Getting started is easy. Visit our website to learn more about the Poly PBX Assessment Service for Microsoft Teams and our complete portfolio of Professional Services for Microsoft Teams or contact your Poly partner to start your migration journey to Microsoft Phone System.

¹ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/skypeforbusiness/hybrid/msft-telephony-solutions

Earlier this year, when the vast majority of office workers around the world suddenly found themselves working from home with little time to prepare, many organizations struggled to set their employees up for success with remote working. Meanwhile, the majority of those who thrived with a distributed workforce, got there thanks to the use of Unified Communications (UC) platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom that allow employees to virtually connect and engage with colleagues, managers and business partners. Combined with the right videoconferencing web cams and professional grade headsets, these cloud-based platforms provide for seamless collaboration.

As many organizations and individuals alike plan for their “next normal”, the decisions made regarding work environments moving forward must be made in conjunction with one another. The pandemic has taught us that organizations have to plan ahead in order to ensure that employees can use their business communication tools and applications regardless of where they are working.

WHAT WILL YOUR WORKING ENVIRONMENT BE?

Is it back into the office full-time? Working from home for the foreseeable future? Or, a hybrid approach of splitting time between in-office and home? If any time is spent working from home, it is important that you and your organization are confident and comfortable that the right tools and practices are in place to ensure successful remote collaboration.

At Poly, we understand that many individuals and organizations are still looking for guidance and we are here to help you. Until the end of October, we are offering a free 20-minute consulting call with one of our technology experts to give you advice.

Consulting Sessions are available for help with:

• Remote working best practices for employees
• Best practices for moving to Microsoft Teams
• Poly headset and management tips
• Video etiquette
• Managing an increased number of remote workers

Simply fill out an inquiry form, and one of our consultants will get in touch with you within two business days to offer you free advice on one of the above listed subjects.

Beyond our free 20-minute consulting call, we have additional consultation options available for you. If you need help with your existing collaboration solution, network health analysis, or headset management, we have three key Work from Anywhere Consulting Services options to help in the following ways:

Poly UC Healthcheck Service – a two-day remote consulting engagement where one of our certified professionals will complete a holistic review of your existing collaboration solutions and remote working demands. You will be provided with a health check summary of your existing UC platform solution with personalized recommendations and proposed next steps to ensure it meets your organizations goals and objectives.

Poly Essential Network Health Service – focuses on delivering remote expert consultancy and analysis of your network and providing you with recommendations for improving performance in meeting the low loss, latency, and jitter requirements needed to support real-time and high-quality communication and collaboration.

Plantronics Manager Pro Onboarding and Adoption Service – provides guidance and best practices around Poly headset management, monitoring, and deployment. Learn more about how to get the most out of Plantronics Manager Pro.

POLY AT YOUR SERVICE

All of our Professional Services are delivered by Poly’s certified UC Experts. Whether you are looking for some free advice or to engage deeper with us, our Poly Global Services team is ready to help enable human connections in the best way. Contact us today.

PART 3 of a 5-PART SERIES

Since the end of January 2020, Microsoft has seen a staggering 500 percent increase in Teams meetings, calling, and conferences, and a 200 percent increase in Teams usage on mobile devices.* Organizations of all sizes are either already using Microsoft Teams or on the path to migrating to it. Those organizations are already achieving the benefits from this unified communication and collaboration (UC&C) platform like the ability for chat, voice and video calling, meetings, file sharing, application integration, etc.  However, there are organizations who haven’t migrated yet because they need help or, they are on Skype for Business-Online and need to make this transition quickly.

At Poly, we understand what you’ll need and the value in providing expert guidance to help organizations with the move to Microsoft Teams. In the first part of this series, we covered what important considerations IT Managers should take into account before migrating their organization to Microsoft Teams. In the second installment, we provided general best practices to ensuring your company’s network is reviewed and ready to handle the traffic and operational rigor required for collaborating with Teams. In this blog, we’re excited to announce Poly’s four Professional Services to help our customers on their transformational journey.

Poly Envisioning for Microsoft Teams

Poly Network Readiness Service for Microsoft Teams

Poly Adoption Consulting Services for Microsoft Teams

Poly User Migration Service for Microsoft Teams

Poly Envisioning for Microsoft Teams

Poly Envisioning for Microsoft Teams is a service designed to accelerate customer’s digital transformation and help maximize business value through the usage and adoption of Microsoft Modern Workplace Cloud Solutions. We help to translate your unique business needs into a customized, actionable roadmap — ultimately driving lasting value and increase business productivity.

Poly Network Readiness Service for Microsoft Teams

When it comes to deploying Microsoft Teams, we recognize the importance in being thoroughly prepared. It’s essential to ensure your network is capable of performing at a consistent, optimal level for carrying real-time media traffic. Poly Network Readiness Service for Microsoft Teams delivers a readiness assessment of your connectivity from the Edge to the Cloud and provides recommendations for improving performance in supporting any low loss, latency, and jitter requirements needed to support real-time media. Network readiness is a key factor for successful deployment of Microsoft Teams and transitioning towards a more collaborative culture.

Poly Adoption Consulting Services for Microsoft Teams

Once making the bold move of transitioning to a new UC&C platform, user adoption should be top of mind. Poly Adoption Consulting Services for Microsoft Teams assists with the development of unique, strategic user adoption plans that inform, educate, and motivate the user communities within Microsoft Teams. As part of the service, we’ll provide you the upfront support needed to drive high adoption. Your end users will discover new, efficient ways to maximize the platform, leading to an overall increase in collaboration and progressively dynamic workspaces. We’ll work closely with you and provide specific recommendations to successfully accelerate the transition to new and better ways of working with Microsoft Teams, and enable users by providing them with innovative tools and greater functionality.

Poly User Migration Service for Microsoft Teams

Alongside the increased adoption of Microsoft Teams is a growing expectation for seamless, successful user migrations that guide customers through essential and complex planning, delivery, and operational activities. Poly User Migration Service for Microsoft Teams leverages the Intelligent Communications capabilities of Microsoft Office 365 framework to migrate organizations from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. It also enables the Microsoft Teams Phone System with Direct Routing and optional audio conferencing in Microsoft Office 365. The business outcome of this service is to help you plan, simplify, and successfully migrate your users to Microsoft Teams.

All these services are delivered by our Global Professional Services Team of Microsoft certified experts. These services are designed to help our customers wherever they are on their journey to Microsoft Teams, and where they need expert advice.

Watch our two-minute video introducing these four new services to learn more.  For more information about Poly Services for Microsoft Solutions, email us at TeamMicrosoft@poly.com.

* Our commitment to customers during COVID-19, Microsoft  March 2020.