The Record - Issue 18: Autumn 2020

118 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om V I EWPO I NT O ver the last six months there has been an acceleration in Microsoft Teams deployments, with a 70 per cent jump to 75 million daily active users by the end of April 2020. Microsoft has been expanding Teams function- ality, quickly adding new features and options to meet the demands of its exponentially growing user-base. Among recent Teams enhancements are improvements made to the Call Quality Dashboard (CQD), which enables IT depart- ments to troubleshoot issues reported by users by offering insight into what has happened, through the monitoring of real-time calls. To augment Teams CQD and better under- stand the user experience, what’s needed is visibility into every aspect of their connection. Monitoring solutions that use synthetic transac- tions, provide insight by simulating user activity which helps identify where bottlenecks exist, allowing IT teams to fix issues before the user experience is impacted. Martello-GSX was recognised by Gartner – a leading research and advisory company – in a July 2020 report titled, Leverage Office 365, Monitoring Practices to Improve Availability and Eliminate Performance Challenges , for offering tools that perform synthetic transactions, focus- ing exclusively on the Microsoft environment which will help to improve user experience. Often users will not file a ticket with their IT support teams about a negative call or a delay in accessing a collaborative document, so there’s no action taken to fix these potential daily occurrences. Over time, these unreliable experiences lead to stalled adoption by reluctant users, causing the business to lose return on their investment. Instead, with a solution that delivers off-hours testing, alerts of service disruptions and deeper analytics to identify root causes faster, IT teams can proactively address issues before the user is impacted. The CQD, like other tools provided by Microsoft, provides real value and is designed to meet a general set of customer needs. Once integrated into the environment, augmenting this toolset with a third-party digital experience monitoring solution means IT staff can take a proactive approach to ensure quality of service and business continuity. Rob Doucette is vice president of product management at Martello Technologies Ensuring quality of service ROB DOUC E T T E : MAR T E L LO T E CHNOLOG I E S Taking a proactive approach to address issues that impact the user is imperative for meeting the customer’s needs