Episode 43

gistfile1.txt

Chris Goosen  0:19  
Welcome to the cloud architects podcast, a podcast about cloud technology and the people using it.

Nicolas Blank  0:26  
The cloud architects podcast is sponsored by Kemp technologies. Choose Kemp to optimize your multi cloud application deployments and simplify multi cloud application management. A single pane of glass for application delivery, Kemp provides a 360 degree view of your entire application environment, and even third party ADCs. Download Kemp 360 for free today at kemptechnologies.com 

Chris Goosen  0:52  
Hello and welcome to another episode of the cloud architects podcast. Today we are in New Zealand of all places. And I must say the weather out here is significantly better than the weather in Sydney where I've just come from. So I took the time took the opportunity here to sit down and we're going to we're going to record and talk a little bit about teams. We don't have on a nick today. I think Nick is in Singapore somewhere. Not sure what Warren's doing. But for those of you who love Warren's energy, never fear. We have a guest who runs at that level right here. So I think we're gonna we're gonna make up for it today. So excited to be sitting down with Paul and Andrew here to talk about teams. Guys, you want to do a quick introduction poll starting with you. 

Paul Bloem  1:34  
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Paul Bloem. I have been a MVP for the last, what is going for six years now? Hopefully, seven soon. I look after a team that has got sort of collaboration, teams, Skype for Business, all the pretty stuff that gets connected to that, but more importantly, these days. I'm focused on adoption on governance, compliance and that sort of thing.

Chris Goosen  1:57  
Very nice.

Andrew Morpeth  1:58  
All right. My name is Andrew. I'm also an MVP been one also for about six years I do believe. So I'm, I'm an ex Skype for Business guy, I suppose we'll still a little bit of Skype for Business came from the office communication server day. So very much engrossed in the enterprise voice stuff, transitioning at the moment into the Microsoft team's world with enterprise voice glasses on at the moment, but sort of working on all the other stuff that teams brings to the table.

Chris Goosen  2:24  
And it brings a lot to the table. Right? I mean, I think there's been, it's been the constant theme for for a couple of years, at least now, there's been a lot of talk about teams and teams and teams that and, you know, obviously, we just come from ignite a couple three months ago now, can you believe it three months. And there was a lot of announcements that ignite and I mean, have you guys seen anything new since ignite that that kind of sticks out to you?

Paul Bloem  2:46  
Yeah, my favorite. new functionality is really the SharePoint view that you get when you're looking at your folder structure within teams, being able to look at the date and timestamps and being able to change the views and create perhaps even my own view I really liked it. It's Yeah,

Andrew Morpeth  3:01  
it adds a bit of complication, but I like it as well. I like that familiar view that you get from SharePoint and there, but more buttons to get used to, I suppose for some users, but I think it's a welcome addition.

Chris Goosen  3:12  
Okay. Well, very nice. Yeah. I mean, there's I think just recently I saw the there was the read receipts have kind of made its way as well which is which is kind of fun because especially when you're in a in a situation where you know, islands mode, you don't always have to do it's gonna be

Andrew Morpeth  3:30  
it could be seen as Big Brother ish. It is configurable by policy but again, I like it it's good to know when someone send your message. And of course, the expectation should be sit that the chat is an instant message, right? It's not It's not the expectation is not instant anymore as it wasn't skype. And sort of training that out of people is a hard thing because we still get those messages of you know, hi, and then they wait for a response. Hi, back. And don't just get to the point and check I'm not used to that persistent nature that teams brings that skype never had.

Chris Goosen  4:04  
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I think, you know, read receipts or in any form of communication is always an interesting one, right? Because like me personally, on my phone on iMessage, I don't have receipts turned on. Yeah. So you know, you'll guess if I've read it or not, but then when I use WhatsApp, because I use WhatsApp a lot as well. I like, you know, the fact the fact that folks can see that I've, you know, read it or not. And it helps me when I can, you know, and I guess maybe it's just the different types of people that communicate on iMessage versus on WhatsApp. Yeah. Yeah, that's

Andrew Morpeth  4:34  
right. It depends what you're trying to avoid, as far as messages, most of your contact address list. And

Paul Bloem  4:40  
when I'm speaking to users, I'm always talking about having some form of a social contract. And that is just the nature in which we behave together. Yeah. So if we know hey, if you've read a message then and if I want a response, because that's a social contract, then please do respond. Or whether we're sharing files or whatever it is we're doing, there's sort of a social agreement. As to how we'll be operating in their team, and I think that's essential. Otherwise you do get that. Hey, are you just ignoring me? And what's going on?

Chris Goosen  5:07  
Yep, yep. And it's hard because sometimes you need to gather your thoughts on something, right? And I like to me, I guess etiquette would dictate that, like, Hey, give me a second or Hey, I'm looking into that for you. I'll get back to you in a second, right? Just to give someone a response so that they know you have acknowledged the message. I find that that's something that doesn't exist all that often in business anymore, right? There's this I need this from you. Give it to me

Andrew Morpeth  5:35  
situation. And now now thing everyone wants everything now these days. Yes, what we're conditioned for, I suppose. But, yeah, again, that comes back to that social contract. Right. And that's why the adoption piece is so important. And unfortunately, it does get lifted out quite a bit. And I think that's probably especially true maybe in our region, because we're a little bit she'll be right. You know, the users will figure it out. Let's spin the budget on Technology, you know, the message I've got is that we can just turn it all on in the cloud, we don't have service to deploy as fireless services cost in that regard. So that should be transition to watering and feeding your users and keeping them up to speed and making sure they understand the tick, because it's changing so quickly, that it's really hard for anyone to keep up with even even myself, right. I mean, I can I struggle to keep up and I'm dealing with a single product.

Paul Bloem  6:24  
Yeah, yeah. I couldn't agree more. And unfortunately, organizations are looking at the technology and going, we can deploy this at a much cheaper cost. Let's save their budget. Yeah. But the real challenge is that traditionally, folks haven't measured success in the way you would think they would. They'd measure success based on does the technology work? Check. It works. Does it do what it said on the label? Yes, yes. But what they never measure is are people using it? Are they circumventing it? Yeah. Is it actually being adopted and used? Are you actually getting value for money for your investment? Yep. Or is it just a white elephant you've just paid for an off the wall. You've saved. So we've, you know,

Chris Goosen  7:01  
we've had some great conversations on this show about adoption and the difference between adoption and consumption, right? And why it's really important to measure the value that comes out of adopting something as opposed to, well, you know, we have someone log into it once every six months, and so therefore, the license is justified. So that's, I mean, it's interesting, and I think it's a very, it can be a very deep topic of conversation just by itself. But what are you guys seeing as far as team's adoption, right? Because if you listen to Microsoft and the Microsoft message, right, obviously, there's a lot of investment going on in teams, the team's product group are doing a lot to promote and market the product. Are you seeing people adopting?

Andrew Morpeth  7:43  
Yeah, hundred percent. I mean, most of the customers I think we touch have already deployed teams to some capacity. So you know, Microsoft wants seats turned on and that's what they're pushing, right. But the most of the customers were saying they've already turned the stuff on. They just need help to do bits. They don't quite understand it in enterprise voice is a key one, because it is still reasonably technical. So that element we get pulled into a lot, I guess the SharePoint aspect of it and the document management stuff is a complex problem a lot of organizations have, they might have things in Dropbox and various other storage solutions or partially or, you know, not properly deployed SharePoint, I need help in that regard. Those would be the two key things do you think?

Paul Bloem  8:23  
Well? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We're seeing a lot of organizer because we've got quite a long, rich history in the Skype for business world. What we're seeing is a lot of organizations, existing customers, and some new who are going we're on Skype for Business want to go to teams. And the challenge I'm seeing is I'm going to them and I'm going well, if you want to go apples for apples, because that's what they say to me. Can you show us compete and so you can't because Skype is an apple, but teams is a fruit salad. Yes, there's some apple in there. Yeah, but there's a hell of a lot of other stuff in there, you know. And so it's often my point of reference, just trying to bring them on board and show them the teams is actually a portal through which you access many other things including a slice of Apple

Chris Goosen  9:00  
Yep, fair enough. That's very well said. I think we might use that future.

Andrew Morpeth  9:05  
I'm gonna adopt that too. I've heard it many times but haven't adopted into my own vocab yet.

Chris Goosen  9:10  
Do you think there's a difference to or in the way? adoption is happening in like here in New Zealand or in the APAC region, for example versus North American, the rest of the world?

Paul Bloem  9:23  
It's a it's a good question. We don't have the visibility we have what's happening elsewhere is through our, you know, our connection through the MVP program and that sort of thing. What what I'm seeing and I'm sure Andrew, you're probably on the same page. A lot of organizations is kind of two, two parts to it. There are those who are really keen to jump in and get it done and who are happy to see the limitations or see the challenges and find ways around them. Because you've highlighted them upfront and then there are others who go I'll just sit back and hold until you tell me it's all good. And that's kind of the two views when they're coming from sort of a Skype well then they are including Andrew specialty enterprise voice

Andrew Morpeth  10:00  
If I was to take a guess I think it comes down to size of organization as to whether and how much time that they'll spend on adoption. And in the New Zealand region, I guess the the typical business size is probably under 100 seats, right, we get the odd, you know, hundred 500 seats, thousand, you know, four or 5000s getting pretty big, you know, biggest company in this entire country is about 35,000 seats run. So I think it probably comes down to that. So my expectation would be sort of North America excetera a lot, a lot more bigger companies, they would probably spend a lot more money on that stuff. They got a lot more people to address. How did it get the information across versus say, 100 seat organization, it's a lot easier for the IT department to just do that they kind of personally know the users.

Paul Bloem  10:44  
You know, it's a bit easier. Yeah. What we're having to come up with ways to introduce adoption concepts and principles in bite sized chunks getting back to my food analogy, because no one's got the funding divvied up the whole bowl, right? Yep. So we've got to give them a little spoon feed chunks as they need to I think

Chris Goosen  11:00  
that's absolutely fascinating. I mean, I had not considered that that the market size is, you know, the average company size is going to be smaller. And so the way that you when you're in a smaller business, there is more of a familiarity of you know, people know each other people know the IT people. And so I think you do deal with training and adoption slightly differently to, you know, when your hundred thousand seat company and the IT guy doesn't know, you're just a name, or an email address to them, right. They don't know each other. No one knows each other.

Paul Bloem  11:30  
Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, when you're looking at the adoption, sort of the, the portfolio of skills you need, you know, there's all these different roles that when you look at the Microsoft framework, there's all these different people you've got in there. You come down to New Zealand, and what do you find? Well, your admin are all things to all people within that space. Yeah. And so you know, it is what it is, and you just got to go with it.

Chris Goosen  11:54  
Yeah, fair enough. And so, with that, I mean, I guess if we look at the types of companies around here are you seeing One of the things we've seen a lot of over the last six or seven months, maybe nine months is tenant to tenant type migrations, m&a type situations, right? And we had for a long time we, that process was pretty well understood and was pretty well, we had it down. We knew, with the workloads that most companies adopted, we could do those types of projects pretty easily with some tool sets and things like that. But with teams in the mix, and because of people adopting teams, it's inevitable that every tenant now has some form of team stuff. Right. And, you know, just recently, I was working with a customer where they, you know, they had kind of sold off a part of their business divested a part of their business, and they had two and a half thousand teams. And and the new business was only taking like 500 of those two and a half thousand teams. And it became I mean, it was, it was very interesting. Yeah, yeah, I got to know the graph API. That's an I I probably would have ever wanted to drop it. That project. But I mean, it was fun, though, but it is very complex.

Paul Bloem  13:05  
Yeah, that the tools for that sort of tenant tenant migrations there. Yeah, I guess I mean, they hardly existing. Right. They're they're pretty, pretty juvenile at best. And so a lot of that comes down to the skill sets of the resources using,

Andrew Morpeth  13:19  
and that can be a creative challenge. And

Chris Goosen  13:21  
it definitely, you know, I think that the point there, or at least to me, is it's arguable whether the investment in because let's be honest, you can do anything. If you put your mind to it. We have PowerShell we have automation things at the end, we can eventually we can get there, right? Oh, you want to migrate conversation history? Well, there's no real API for that, but we could probably get it done. I know Lee Ford. MVP out of the UK has a fantastic script and does some stuff. And you know, I used his stuff a lot in the past or at least on that project. I owe you a beer there Lee we'll see each other at summit. I'm buying the first round.

Andrew Morpeth  13:58  
About a second Yeah.

Chris Goosen  13:59  
But you've got to get to a point at some point where you go, well, the resource costs associated with coming up with these include g bomb Grant Solutions isn't worth the reward of Yeah, getting the stuff. Absolutely.

Paul Bloem  14:10  
You've got to, and we had a discussion about that earlier today. Sometimes you've got the sort of idea of perfection on a plan of where you got to go. And then there's the budget. Yep. So you got to kind of draw a line in the sand and go, look, we can give you that perfect outcome that you want, but it's gonna cost you a hell of a lot of money. So what are you comfortable with paying? Yeah, how much can we deliver for that? And you've got to set that expectation right from the beginning. And it gives you a bit of leeway to deliver accordingly.

Chris Goosen  14:38  
Yeah. And I think that's, that's the important part. That's our job as technologists, right, is to be upfront with our customers and actually advise them to that, right. I think Unfortunately, there's this sort of sense lately of people just becoming button clickers, right, instead of actually being advisors or consultants to to the customers because you know, it's so much cheaper to do it. Project 100% remote that it is yeah, to go and stand there talking to your customer. But when you're actually spending the time with them, you can actually then have types these types of conversations and actually deliver significant more value than just Next. Next Next thing through that

Andrew Morpeth  15:13  
person is so important. Yeah, video conferencing to a degree. Yeah. You need to get to know people and have candid conversations. And yeah, at least initially, you need to have those in person, I still think there's still merit in that.

Paul Bloem  15:24  
We're still old school that way within our team. Any project that we kick off, we always insist on you know, initially at very least getting them eye to eye contact. Our body language, customer's body language, you basically install confidence, and you help them to appreciate that, hey, these guys know what they're doing and they're here to help me. And of course between Andrew and I were always waiting for that first project in Fiji but it hasn't happened

Andrew Morpeth  15:52  
yet, or any other island nation.

Chris Goosen  15:55  
So tell me about and I think you might be the best Andrew might be the most positive sort of work. So the islands mode trap is something that I've, we've seen a lot of

Andrew Morpeth  16:06  
Yep. Yeah, I've heard that term I coined I haven't quite used it myself, but it's certainly a problem. You know, Microsoft obviously want adoption of teams. And for them islands makes sense because it means by default, generally speaking, if you're a three, five, you know, one of those plans you get, it's going to just be turned on unless the admins have done something to circumvent that, right. You just get it. So if someone starts using it, since an IM chat, I should call up to someone or some sort of message, it will get to the other participant and they can kind of join and it's there. The problem I find with it is it causes interrupt issues because in Ireland's as the name suggests, both Skype for Business if you're using that as very separate teams and they run independently of each other. And with Ireland's being the default. You really need your customers to understand that they need to drive adoption away from Skype entities. teams and make sure everyone's aware of it. Because things that can happen. For example, as I seen Paul a chat message, right? He doesn't know what teams is he's never used it because his company hasn't announced that it exists. It's just turned on. And he's found it. I found it. And I've sent him a chat message. Yes, he'll get an email notification, say someone's trying to get you in teams. But he's never heard of his Oh, was this team's thing throws it in this junk email, right. So creates a poor experience for the users that who are using it. And the ones because of the ones that aren't interested in kind of self learning it. So that's where the problem is. So what you really want in my view, is you want to make a call up front, you want to decide what platform you're going to use, and sit that mode accordingly. For one by doing that, it ensures that the interrupt works. We get a lot of customers saying it doesn't work. And it's not that it doesn't work. It's that probably you're in islands mode, or probably you don't quite understand what the modes actually mean. So in the very basic sense of it, there's a Skype only mode which centrally, your teams is disabled, and you only use Skype. And then at the other end of the scale, there's a team's only mode where you don't use Skype anymore. And you you fully transition to teams. There's modes in the middle that let you transition features across, for example, there's a Skype with teams meeting mode, right. And those modes essentially will allow you to present to the user what they should be using and what client and if you have half your user base on Skype, and half on teams, it guarantees the interrupt based on the modes that each of your users are on. So if I'm in Skype, and I send a chat message to someone who is in teams, I don't need to know that they're in teams. By setting those policies correctly for each user. Microsoft will make sure that that happens, right. And and largely this works. This works well. And it works for even for Skype hybrid server deployments. So yes, I think it probably is a trap. That's probably not the best default. I understand why Microsoft have done it. But it's, you know, it's up to you IT admins out there, too. Get across it and make sure you deploy the mode that suits you and understand what it means.

Chris Goosen  19:04  
Yeah, I think so. But really bottom line here is it can be really confusing to the end user when when email messages flying around. And yeah, you know, and I saw this, you know, internally, we we weren't on as much for a long time. And, you know, I was on teams only because I was one of the tests guinea pigs, right. But then like, my manager, for example, would not be and so I'm trying to, I am aiming from teams, two teams, but you know, his presence is away because he's not even looking at the team's client. He's using Skype for everything. So I ended up having two contacts for him one that has the Skype icon next to it. One that doesn't it. Like for me, that's confusing. Can you imagine for like an end user who has no idea what's going on here? It's

Paul Bloem  19:43  
a shame because the technology we're talking about is designed to connect people. Yes. Forget it. We're in a situation where we're disconnecting. Yes, yeah.

Chris Goosen  19:53  
Yeah. So I think really important to spend the time here thinking about not only like, how will you want What the best user experience is going to be for your situation. But also, make sure the timeline is understood because it can be very easy trap to fall into forgive the pun, to, okay, we're going to enable this, it's going to coexist. So we don't need to worry about accelerating the deployment, because, hey, it's going to work right. You know, it's kind of like a, like a hybrid deployment. You know, there are a lot of folks in the exchange water use hybrid as a long term coexistence mode, right, which is, which is fine and in, it certainly works for that. But you don't want to be doing that with this. You kind of want to use it to make sure that you're transitioning correctly, but get the transaction done as quickly as you can. Yeah,

Paul Bloem  20:37  
it's got to be a driver.

Andrew Morpeth  20:38  
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Once customers understand what it means it's actually a reasonably easy decision to take to the business and say, Look, we need to make this decision, what's it going to be? And then what I mean, the easiest thing to do and if people had people have done that out the out front, right, or if Microsoft had made Skype only the default because everyone was on Skype or You know, something like that. And then he forced the admins to make the decision, it probably would have created a bitter experience, because people would have had to go and turn things on and really understand what it meant. And I personally don't like the default. But

Paul Bloem  21:13  
yeah, I'll back you up on that. I totally agree. I don't like the idea of having dual apps with overlapping features. It confuses people. But as soon as you change those modes to something else, you're taking something away and if you ever want to annoy users take something away so it leaves you in a in a nasty place which I guess is a good thing for us since it's how we make our bread

Andrew Morpeth  21:34  
well one thing I find amusing is that that is completely the opposite in the personal world, like people run around with WhatsApp iMessage everything on their phones they got no problem switching between them for you know different chats but when it comes to enterprise Yep, it kind of has to be run by the business that you work for otherwise they disinterested in it for what are

Chris Goosen  21:54  
we also we're at a point now where things are so like the always on on by default is Such a thing now, right? Like if you I think the the team's app is now being deployed with, with Office. Yeah. So to kind of get away from it, and you know, I, my wife, I often use my wife's company organization as a great kind of example of a lot of things because they, you know, they use the whole gamut of technologies. They use Google, they use WebEx stuff. And I know the other day, I was looking at a laptop for something, I was helping you out with something. And I was like, Hey, you have teams, and she was like, oh, let's just got installed the other day. I don't know what that's for. Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of just, uh, you know, you, you just, I mean, it's a great example of actually being able to, you know, communicate to your users when changes coming. But also, there's so much overlap between so many different things and different vendors are doing same things. And you know, why on earth the WebEx folks called their product teams as well. It's just beyond me like it just,

Andrew Morpeth  22:53  
you know, mix it up some more.

Chris Goosen  22:55  
But let's not scratch open that wound right now. So, okay, so let's, let's talk a little bit about, I guess, direct routing and the voice side of things.

Andrew Morpeth  23:06  
Okay. So for those that don't know direct routing is essentially a bring your own SIP trunk to Microsoft Teams. It's a it's an over the internet encrypt encrypted SIP trunk between your session border controller or SBC to the Microsoft Teams edge. There's various ways you can deploy it. So you can use a supported or certified SBC. So there's the likes of ribbon audiocodes. And there's a few other ones Oracle and I'm trying to rattle them off off the top of my head hear this, but the other way you can do that is it's opened the doors for telcos to start offering the service as well. So they're building out their SBC platforms to support direct routing and then offering SIP trunks directly to teams on your behalf right at little to no more additional costs as what we're seeing in the market here. So you know, it might be $1 $2 more for a SIP trunk as opposed to Something delivered on premise that you'd have to hook up to your own SBC. They take away the headache. And that makes sense for a lot of customers who are trying to get everything off Prem, move everything to cloud. They've already got a telco relationship, that telco offers the service. They just turn it on, migrate the numbers across, and you're done. There's still some merit. I think in having an SBC. I like it. When customers choose the SBC option selfishly probably because it gives me a inbetween vantage point to see where things are going wrong if they're going wrong. It also lets me do things like manipulate numbers and and, you know, do some diverting and different things like that that's not quite there in the team's Admin Center at the moment or available as a feature, right. So the SBC gives you some additional capability that you wouldn't have if you go for a run of the mill hosted solution. So those are the two options we have in our market and there's obviously the Microsoft calling plans, but they're only in sort of 11 1213 countries off the top of my head. Were you just buying the minutes directly of Microsoft.

Chris Goosen  25:01  
Yeah. How what would you say would be the percentage of folks who organizations who already have an SBC that that they just essentially using what they have versus new purchases? Yeah,

Andrew Morpeth  25:12  
a lot of our customers because we've been just hitting the sand with Skype for Business for so long so many years. You know, all the customers we deal with a pretty well I'd say 95% of our Skype customers are enterprise voice enabled which means they have SBCs a lot of those SBCs have always been Microsoft Certified so therefore they can be firmware upgraded to support the team's journey. So yeah, most of our customers who have Scott definitely will have an SBC if they don't, you know, you can buy one you can go for the hosted service. These are all supported virtualized now. So you know, you can get pick one up for a few hundred bucks. It's a reasonably cheap entry point. Yeah. If you want to host it. We have

Paul Bloem  25:54  
we have a split with several organizations and there's a number I'm working with at the moment who are trying to be resilient geographically to, you know, disasters and that sort of thing. But a lot of them have components that don't traditionally work with sort of a hosted or cloud based SBC so that they might have some elevator phones, they might have some Nish contact center that doesn't talk to teams. And so we'll use the session border controller as a voice gateway or router, right, that allows you to intercept and interoperate these different platforms. fair to say those are massively more complex in terms of deployment, and looking after and so on. And that I guess it's fair to say that's our Kung Fu, we may get some good margin of that. We know that space very well. And those who have gone down that path have made their choice knowingly because of constraints, functions, features, that sort of thing that's not available in the Skype or even team's world.

Andrew Morpeth  26:50  
Yeah, that's right. But the key the key things we use SBCs for if we have access to them ourselves, number one, and ELA and allocated numbers. There's no reason way to handle that in teams right now. So in the SBC, I can I can see that teams doesn't know what that number is. And then I can basically do a reroute and maybe rewrite that as the reception queue or something like that and send the number elsewhere. It's probably one of the key things that we use it for. And also just general number manipulations, which, as far as I can tell, I've seen, I've seen some stuff surface in the PowerShell. Properties, but I don't believe they're accessible to be seen just yet. But there are some translation capabilities that I think are going to be surfaced in teams soon. So that will negate some of us. But that's probably the key thing that we enjoy having an SBC for, on top of bit, the trace, the traceability being able to see what what is Microsoft saying, what are the telco say? Yep. And where should I focus my efforts to find the problem versus don't have an SBC I need to look in the Microsoft portal, try and gather as much information I can from the logging, which is not as detailed as traces and go from there. And then Maybe I've got to engage the telco because its their problem so, it takes a little bit longer yes on an SBC trace, we can figure out exactly what's going on straightaway. Yeah,

Chris Goosen  28:08  
I can see how that would be beneficial and how potentially having some third party doing the sort of cloud SBC situation would would cause a situation of people pointing fingers at each other, right? Yeah. But then but then you also have a few you know, if you really want to keep it very simple and you potentially a smaller organization, you could just buy the minutes if you're in a supportive market, you could just buy the minutes from Microsoft and distribute it all. Then you have the one throat to choke as they say, Well, yeah, it's all Microsoft Microsoft thing that exact Okay,

Andrew Morpeth  28:35  
so there's plenty options. It just comes down to your your preference, okay, we just normally talk it through with the customer. totally up to them. We don't we don't push any particular way of doing it down their throat. It's Yeah, we

Paul Bloem  28:46  
don't we don't have a preferred service or anything like it will be. We basically go pros and cons. What's the customer's current relationships with with whoever they're dealing with, and then we try and work with them to find some short yet

Chris Goosen  29:00  
And how about I mean, are you seeing a lot of customers replacing their traditional PBX systems with with teams? And do you think teams is ready for that? Is it really?

Andrew Morpeth  29:11  
It's a hard one to answer. It's not quite there. Really. It's at the tipping point, I think so where it will suit a customer as well. You've got simple requirements. Okay. So we're we're mostly seeing people take the plunge to enterprise voice and teams, is professional services type industries, because they don't have super complex requirements. This generally people like us, lawyers, accountants, those sorts of people who are making and receiving calls directly to them. And they might have a receptionist or to receptionist or something like that simple call flow coming in, distributes calls, that that works pretty well. But there's still limitations even in that right. The call queues are getting pretty good. Some of the features of the call queues getting better than Skype, some aren't quite as mature. The biggest ones that we come up against that a well worth noting is, by default from a queue, you can't fold out to a PSTN number, you know, it's quite a common requirement, maybe an uncle tick or something you need to go directly out. So, workaround, you need a dummy user account that's fully licensed, you know, so you kind of have to create your own creative ways of doing things. Another one that we that impacts us, I think it's more of an APAC issue. Not a global issue from other people I've talked to is that there's significant call queue delay. So when you answer a call queue call, you can I've seen up to eight seconds before you get audio right. Wow, that's a pretty disjointed experience for the agent trying to answer calls right, where they're going to sit there and wait for the the audio to kick in. So that's problematic. And we've we've had to for some customers who don't think that's acceptable, and I don't think that's acceptable personally, some customers live with it. But for customers that don't want to live with it, we've had to use again, dummy user accounts using the core group capability of a user endpoint tops it out, right? So we create a core group in the user config and distribute calls that way. Again, another creative way of doing things to work around some immaturities in the product. So, you know, if, if you're going to move enterprise voice to teams, my general messages, you've got to be willing to deal with some rough edges. I wouldn't call it bleeding edge anymore, but it's kind of just come out of the bleeding edge. And it's for the early majority, certainly who are willing and able and prepared to be kind of flexible and you know, working around how they might have expected it to work versus the realities of it. So you really need to make sure you understand how enterprise voice works and compare feature for feature for you know, what you've got and what you've come from and determine what you're prepared to give up them to get to teams at this enterprise voice for at this early stage. Yeah, but enterprise voice is not what Microsoft's really pushing as a it's really the collaboration So that stuff's gonna mature, they're moving it from the Skype online world it's getting there. It's, it's, I've always said probably by the end of this year, we'll probably be at the point where Man, these features are actually probably better than Skype. Now a lot of them are already kind of better. I like the auto attendance better the text to speech, there's a lot of stuff that's better is just some stuff that's just not quite there 

Paul Bloem  32:21  
It needs a bit of time to mature. So a lot of businesses are not quite ready to take the plant. They want to see it prove itself and you who can blame them? Yeah. But for me, the real shining star in the team space when you're coming from a Skype for business background is the meeting space. I absolutely love the meeting space. It's one of my favorite things to talk about it being able to see and there's some really cool things coming that just can't wait to get my hands on and just having a look at Skype versus a team's meeting. It kind of feels a little 80s. Yeah.

Andrew Morpeth  32:54  
I mean, yeah, hasn't changed much past what it was a messenger you know, it's all that same sort of format, it looks nice bit nicer. But it's sort of that messenger. It's very old school instant message. And I say, teams is definitely the new thing and the way forward and just jumping back to modes, right? This is where you can use Mosier advantage if you're a Skype customer and you're an enterprise voice in teams isn't ready for you've checked it out, you can still enable your users as Skype for Business with teams collaboration and meetings. So that lights up meetings and teams and you've got the collaboration stuff, which Skype arguably doesn't work that either doesn't do and meetings, probably not as good. You can light that up in teams, but still ensure that the enterprise voice features are still in teams. And so sorry. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Goosen  33:39  
Yeah, that's actually a good point. Um, I you know, I think we're seeing rapid development on this though, right? It's not like Microsoft were promising or making promises a year ago that they still making today

Andrew Morpeth  33:50  
or we're still delivering stuff. Yeah. Which which, but Skype didn't really change too much over the last. I mean between 2013 and 20. 15 versions? I mean, yeah, there were a few sort of small additions, but it hasn't fundamentally changed for quite a long time. Whereas teams is new and exciting. And it's certainly the way forward and and it's, I think meeting the needs of the modern kind of information work a much better than Skype does or ever will. Because, you know, Skype's, I guess, at the start of at sunset and a lot of ways, right, it's still a valid product, we still recommend it where it makes sense. And the great thing about choosing Scott is that you have a way to get to teams, it's you can have, you can still deploy Skype and have some users on teams, you can have some of your users using teams made, you know, you've got the best of both worlds if you go that way. And yeah, still completely valid solution, completely valid solution, but it is it's kind of where the PBX was 15 years ago when Skype and these UC platform started coming out. PB x's are still around, but they're sort of kind of the almost did now. Right. Scott's gonna be around for 510 years, I'd say, you know, before it disappears.

Paul Bloem  35:06  
Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. It's been incredible. I come from a PBX background, he used to work for Siemens, and the the mentality there was delivering services in a way that they could address what they perceive as problems, like, you know, pick up groups and hunt groups and all this sort of thing. And I always say that, you know, with Skype, and also with teams, the notion is different. I always argue with, you know, when I'm doing training sessions with users always tell them that when, when I'm trying to reach you, who knows best how to get hold of you, me, or you, will you do you know, whether you're on the run or whether you're at home or whether you're in a hotel, so I shouldn't change my behavior of reaching you, you control how that's delivered. And that's fundamentally how it's changed the way people communicate. It's been brilliant. But the scary bit is it's developing so fast, and that's scary, but it's also very exciting. And very often, and we might have to take a time check right now because this might be invalid by the time I get to the end of the sentence, current state of features is evolving so fast that sometimes I'm busy showing somebody something and then I find that it's changed.

Chris Goosen  36:11  
Well, we will run into that problem every now and then right away. The best is when you're in the Admin Center trying to do a demo of something that the customer has asked, then you can't find where it is. You're like, I saw this was here just yesterday. And they're like, yeah, sure, it was. Yeah. And this is because the UI moves something just a little bit around. So that's it. I mean, it's it's a problem. Right. But I guess it's part of the challenge we have is just going to stay on top of that. And so I mean, we, we talked about, I guess, teams being a fairly, you know, fruit salad versus just an apple. Right. But, I mean, I guess one of the questions that a lot of folks probably listening to this or watching this have is how is their skillset relevant in the new teams world, right, because I think, to me right now, there's no such thing as a team's SME because teams is made up of so many different pieces, hit the fruit salad That it depends on your background and where you come from. 

Paul Bloem  37:02  
Absolutely. It's, it's at this early stage, there are not a lot of people on the planet who have got a handle across, even 80% of the underlying bits of technology. And, and we're finding that you know, So traditionally coming from a voice background and having lots of Skype for Business, and now transitioning into the governance and compliance areas and all the adoption stuff. When you look at that whole spectrum, you do need different skill sets across so you there is you're dead, right? There is no such thing as one person who knows it all. And and we're finding that, you know, we've got some SharePoint guys in the team, and I'm relying heavily on them, and they're teaching me things all the time. Yep. And just getting a feel for how they, you know, put things in place around governance, compliance, and, you know, around all that sort of control, but I'm learning lots, but what I'm finding is there's a lot more consulting than actual pushing nerd knobs and buttons.

Chris Goosen  37:58  
Yes, yeah,

Andrew Morpeth  37:59  
yeah, it's Very true. Yeah. I mean, I somewhat missed the Skype days where you could be intimately familiar with a single platform and just know everything about it. Because now in this world, you cannot know everything about the entire stack. And teams is just a window into multiple micro services in teams, I'd say to sis admins, you've already got a whole ton of skills already that you might not know you have. Because teams is leveraging stuff you already know. It's just a window into that that stuff, right? So yes, it is a collaboration focused product and there's stuff to learn in that regard. But a lot of the underlying technologies you probably familiar with

Chris Goosen  38:37  
it so my Sorry, it's almost like it the the different areas or components of it also make for different deployments. Right. So for example, when you have a voice deployment, your voice requirements, I guess, fairly binary in terms of customers are going to know they have these phone numbers that need to be answered in this way or handled in this way. But when it comes to the compliance and the governance stuff. That stuff's gonna be so varied based on industry and location. And very often, customers don't actually have. They don't understand the requirements that they have

Andrew Morpeth  39:10  
muted a lot of customers exactly in small I couldn't afford to put that stuff in. But now they get it. Yep. So they can deploy it, but they know nothing about it, really.

Chris Goosen  39:19  
And if they don't make the right, you know, it's almost like making the right governance decisions up front. You know, if we take our minds back to, you know, 8 10 years ago, when the Yammer was, you know, first busting up on the scene may even have been longer than that. I don't want to go back that far. But, you know, I have battle scars from but but it was one of those things where, like, if you didn't, in the very beginning, put in some really solid governance. It became such a mess. Yeah. And and then fixing it retroactively afterwards was really hard. And teams is kind of like that, too. I think like if you just enable it and just walk away. You're going to come back in a week and it's going

Paul Bloem  39:54  
to be absolutely so so take your Yammer problem. Yeah. And I'll see your Yeah, Yammer problem with my SharePoint issue. Yeah. 10 exactly, which was just to add on, and she'll be right, what happened? Yep. And then we'll throw in some Skype for Business and a few other bits and pieces. And guess what? We have the most complicated combination of things we've ever seen. Yeah. And so what could possibly go wrong? 

Chris Goosen  40:14  
Yeah, exactly. And people, people almost like because we talked about, and I said this already one time. Today, we talk about change management and adoption a lot on this on the show. And we talk about governance and compliance and all of these things. And a lot of people think that these are just buzzwords that we're throwing out and because they sound cool, well, this this very good reason why these things come up over and over and over again is because, you know, I'm sure you guys also see customers who have not made the right decisions up front or have kind of gone down the wrong path just a little bit and then you come in and now you're, you're trying to backtrack just a tad to to help them out. And so that's it, you know, the message is consistent because these things are really important.

Paul Bloem  40:56  
Yeah, I tell stories to the highlight you So we keep the innocent innocent by not naming any names. And I always tell them a story. So depending on the the organization, and I use some scary story, I heard a story last week from a customer who said, We don't like to, you know, talking about shadow IT, we don't like to force our users down any particular path. There are creative bunch, and we don't want to limit that. And of course, at the same time, they're they're an organization who's creating new things. And if those things were to leak, yeah, well, that'd be the end of them. Yep. So once I'm married those two things together and said so. So I've got some some pictures we took the other night, Andrew, I'll share them with you. They're my Dropbox and I accidentally share the entire Dropbox directory. I also have some very sensitive information in there right now and knowing we have shared with you, and I can't even tell

Chris Goosen  41:46  
you access. Exactly.

Paul Bloem  41:47  
Yeah. So there's all this kind of stuff. So I usually just find an angle for the customer in question, and then I'll tell them a story leading down a path. Yeah. And usually at the end of it, they've got these massive eyeballs staring at me and like I've just scare the hell out. Do it.

Andrew Morpeth  42:00  
Yeah. And you don't have to necessarily go bananas on it, but you've got to at least sit down and have the conversations with the business and just go, you know, at least make an informed decision. Yeah. And goes because fires you can afford to or want to or you know, but at least have a bit of a think about it before you just didn't roll on

Paul Bloem  42:17  
know the risks. Right? Yeah.

Chris Goosen  42:18  
Yep. I absolutely. I think that's a very, very good advice. And it's the kind of, I guess, top off or come to a close here, guys, it's been awesome talking to you. Thank you for taking the time and showing me around Auckland in the great weather and whatnot. And before we go, I guess we you know, we always kind of like to plug give you the opportunity to plug yourself so each of you studying the book, how do you want to be found Do you even want to be found?

Paul Bloem  42:45  
Hidden not hiding? I try to make a bit of noise on LinkedIn and it's just PaulBorm_NZ. That's where I'm at and of course my blog as yucsorted.com. That's where I am. Yeah, fair enough.

Andrew Morpeth  42:59  
Yeah, almost. active on the Twitter community. My handle is @AndrewMorpeth. That might be a bit difficult to spell. So find me at ucgeek.co That's my blog. So check me out there and the links to Twitter and various other channels that I post information on there as well.

Chris Goosen  43:16  
Cool. I'll put all that in the show notes too. So folks can just click through and and I guess the next thing when next time we'll be seeing each other is that summit coming up in full year? Bring it on month or so just to sort of a month so I

Paul Bloem  43:27  
know now it's it's been recorded first round to be a second. That'd be

Andrew Morpeth  43:30  
Yeah, fair enough. We know he's not offering anything

Chris Goosen  43:33  
we may or may not be a Joey's at some point. During summer we will be. Well, guys, thank you again for your time. Really appreciate it. Yeah. So it's the sit down here and I'm sure we'll be chatting again. Thank you. Cool.

Warren du Toit  43:45  
Everyone. Before you go, we just wanted to say thank you for listening. We really enjoyed putting this podcast together for you every two weeks. Please visit us at thearchitects.cloud. Alternatively, drop us a tweet. We'd love to hear what you have to say @thecloudarch