As of 2024, Microsoft Teams boasts over 300 million daily active users, reflecting its widespread adoption and utility. Users on average participate in more than 2.7 billion meeting minutes daily, highlighting the platform’s crucial role in facilitating communication and collaboration. However, ensuring optimal call quality and performance can present challenges. Microsoft Teams employs Call Analytics to monitor and troubleshoot issues by providing detailed information about devices, networks, and connectivity. Additionally, Microsoft Teams administrators have access to various usage reports that offer insights into user activity, such as the number of active users, messages posted, and meeting participation.
The Power of Microsoft Teams: Key Business Advantages
Microsoft Teams serves as a central hub for teamwork, seamlessly offering chat, video conferencing, file sharing, and integration with other Microsoft 365 applications. This platform provides several key business advantages to enhance productivity and collaboration within your organization:
- Seamless Communication: Microsoft Teams integrates chat, voice calls, and video conferencing into a single platform, making it easy to communicate with colleagues in real-time.
- Enhanced Collaboration: With real-time document collaboration, multiple team members can work on the same file simultaneously, reducing the need for back-and-forth emails and avoiding version control issues.
- Integration with Microsoft 365: Microsoft Teams seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, allowing for easy file sharing and editing within the Teams interface.
- Remote Collaboration: Teams is well-suited for remote work, offering a virtual office environment where remote team members can collaborate effectively, bridging geographical gaps.
- Reduced Email Overload: By using Teams for conversations and file sharing, you can significantly reduce the volume of emails, making communication more efficient.
Common Microsoft Teams Challenges
While Microsoft Teams is a powerful tool for unified communications, users can encounter some common issues. Without minute-by-minute data on Teams sessions, IT teams struggle to pinpoint performance issues with a high degree of accuracy. Here are the common challenges:
- Dropped Calls: This can be due to network issues, such as insufficient bandwidth, high latency, or packet loss.
- Audio and Video Quality: Poor audio or video quality can result from network congestion, incompatible devices, local cache filled up, or outdated software.
- Meeting Failures: Users might face difficulties joining or staying in meetings, often due to network instability or software glitches.
- Sign-In Issues: Problems with signing in can be caused by incorrect credentials, network issues, or misconfigured single sign-on (SSO) settings.
- Device Compatibility: Using non-certified devices can lead to various issues, including drop calls and poor audio quality.
- Network Configuration: Improper network settings can lead to various issues, including call drops and poor meeting quality.
Enhancing Microsoft Teams with ControlUp: Real-time Visibility and Troubleshooting
ControlUp enhances the Microsoft Teams experience by rapidly identifying and addressing performance issues across networks, ISPs, and user devices. It precisely pinpoints the source of the disruption to deliver an optimal end-user experience in Teams. Here are some of the key features that enable a better experience:
- Microsoft Teams Overview: A bird’s-eye view of every call and meeting activity, whether within the organization or externally with clients or partners.
- Live caller: View the quality and location of every call and meeting with real-time data from the ControlUp device agent.
- Performance: Deeper analysis is just a click away with this easy-to-consume dashboard, which features color-coded and history view charts. It can find failure rates, load times, and performance issues.
- Service availability: View the test results from the synthetic tests, which can be run from anywhere worldwide to determine whether the problem is global or regional.
- Device performance: Drill down to the call time and see device performance indicators that might cause an issue, such as low Wi-Fi or another application consuming all the available RAM.
- Usage metrics: Dive into audio, video, and screen-sharing quality metrics. Differentiate between regular calls, video conferences, and other collaboration sessions.
- Call quality sentiment: Displays call sentiment and autonomously send user surveys, allowing IT to tap into the user perspective.
- Geographical views: Get geographical data on which data centers people are connecting to across the globe and filter by quality of service, such as voice, video, or screen sharing.
- Experience scoring: View real-time experience scores of live calls to help identify what devices need immediate resolutions to keep the meeting going without any issues.
- Troubleshooting scripts: Troubleshooting scripts can extract more information about the device and application issues during a call that had an issue.
- Automated alerting: Alerting helps IT stay proactive when the service goes down. With automated alerting, IT can notify users of any issues with the service before employees flood the service desk.
- Remediation scripts: IT can run remediation scripts to solve many issues, such as clearing the Microsoft Teams or Zoom cache, with a simple button click.
Optimizing Unified Communications: Microsoft Teams + ControlUp
When combined, Microsoft Teams and ControlUp offer a comprehensive solution that maximizes productivity, efficiency, and end-user experience in unified communications.
- Enhanced Performance: ControlUp’s real-time monitoring ensures that Microsoft Teams run smoothly, with any performance issues quickly identified and resolved.
- Improved User Experience: By optimizing the performance of Teams, ControlUp helps ensure that users have a seamless and productive experience, enhancing collaboration and communication.
- Proactive Management: ControlUp’s detailed insights and analytics allow IT teams to proactively manage and optimize their Microsoft Teams environment, preventing issues before they impact users.
- Cost Savings: With ControlUp’s optimization tools, businesses can ensure they are using their resources efficiently, reducing unnecessary costs and maximizing their investment in Microsoft Teams.
Together, Microsoft Teams and ControlUp provide a robust, integrated solution that enhances unified communications, making it easier for businesses to achieve their goals and thrive in the evolving digital landscape.
Ready to transform your Microsoft Teams experience? Schedule a demo today to learn more.
