Deploying Microsoft Teams but have Webex Users?

Microsoft Teams now boasts over 145 million daily active users. So, the chance of traditional Cisco houses using Teams have increased exponentially.

If you use Cisco hardware for video conferencing, this could mean you have users already using Webex for messaging.

And now they’ve got Teams too.

Using two or more messaging platforms within your organization isn’t inherently wrong.

But, when unifying communication, there are potential friction points if not architected appropriately.

Consider the following:

1. How can you be sure a colleague who primarily uses Webex will be able to message a colleague who primarily uses Microsoft Teams?
2. Does each user have an account provisioned on both apps or only one of them?
3. If each employee has a login for both chat apps, will they need to actively use and monitor both on both desktop and mobile?
4. If not, do employees generally know which app to use to get the fastest response from any given colleague?

If this is the case at your company, read below as there are special considerations for those Webex users when the rest of your company is deploying Microsoft Teams.

Guidance from Microsoft

The introduction of Microsoft Teams came with the Practical Guidance for Cloud Voice framework – formerly the Skype Operations Framework.

These are both robust, tried, and tested frameworks that help deploy and adopt Skype for Business and now Teams.

Before you get started on your rollout, Microsoft has published a Getting Started Guide for IT Admins.

Microsoft outlines 4 key stages to rolling out Teams:

1. Understand Teams
2. Deploy Teams
3. Launch Teams
4. Feedback and Support

Further to this, Microsoft has published a series of videos to aid your Teams deployment.

Microsoft Teams pilot

Before you undertake your Teams deployment, it’s crucial to conduct a pilot. It’s important to note the terminology here.

This is not a proof of concept. Businesses often get bogged down with a proof of concept – the concept has been proven, Microsoft Teams is a stable platform transforming business all over the world. 145 million daily active users, remember?

What you are doing here is running a pilot to suit your needs.

Your pilot needs to be tailored to your business’s unique needs and bespoke requirements.

A select pilot committee is crucial. You need your most vocal users and key stakeholders on-side from day one.

Failure to engage and win over the right people could put the entire pilot – and migration – in jeopardy.

What is missing from these plans is a common scenario we run into with our customers…

Deploying Microsoft Teams when some users also use Webex.

In a recent independent survey, we learned that 62% of businesses using Cisco endpoints are using Microsoft Teams in parallel.

So this hybrid UC co-existence could come in a variety of ways.

Microsoft Teams vs Webex?
Or
Microsoft Teams and Webex?

When you plan for that great day when your Microsoft Teams rollout is complete, do you have a plan for your Webex users?

Your Cisco users may have organically introduced Webex as the collaboration tool in your company and could see Microsoft as the competing intruder. 

You have two options, and you may not have known the 2nd was even possible!

1 – Remove Webex and migrate to Microsoft Teams

An extremely common question is: “How do we officially move users off Webex when we move to Microsoft Teams?”

We often hear this following a merger or acquisition – when the new company is using Webex and the assumption is that everybody has to collaborate in the same app.

Here are two key considerations as you work to get buy-in from your Webex users:

You’ll need to prevent data loss when migrating Webex channels to Microsoft Teams channels.

You will need to re-map channels that exist in both Webex and Microsoft into one Teams channel and migrate all of the existing content over.

You will need to tell your team they should prepare to lose data or have a lapse in access to that data for a period of time.

You’ll have to reconfigure all your Microsoft connectors so your Webex apps and bots work in Microsoft

It’s the add-ons and plugins that make collaboration apps thrive. You most likely have dozens – some have hundreds – of bots or integrations running in Webex.

Firstly, you’ll need to conduct an audit of what you have.

This could be a good exercise to remove redundant bots that don’t need to be replicated as connectors.

If the Microsoft Teams integration is not available yet, you may need to find a workaround solution or a different SaaS provider entirely.

Remember that in general, people will be averse to losing the app they live in all day.

This effort may take many weeks or months of careful planning.

2 – Interoperability between Webex and Microsoft Teams

Collaboration apps are extremely personalized and users will always have their favorite integrations, connectors, and bots that they use and rely on, day in day out. 

In the long term, planning to support two or more messaging environments, like Webex and Microsoft Teams gives your IT strategy more flexibility, as long as everyone can work together across different chat platforms.

That’s where Mio can help.

Mio keeps everyone chatting and collaborating in their existing Webex workspaces and their Microsoft Teams environments while federating messaging across all platforms.

This truly is the best of both worlds.

Everyone gets to collaborate the way they prefer, without the need for a big migration plan.

Mio for Webex + Microsoft Teams interoperability

With Mio, your Webex users don’t need to change platforms and will still be able to chat with colleagues on Microsoft Teams, and vice versa.

Mio is simple to set up:

• Connect Microsoft Teams and Webex channels
• Break out into direct messages
• Team members can immediately chat in DMs or groups with members on other platforms
• File sharing, threaded messages, reactions, and the ability to edit and delete messages are all supported
• New conversations will be mirrored in the primary chat platform each employee prefers to use

Get started by adding Mio to your Microsoft Teams (or Webex) account 👇