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You’re an IT Manager on an Island

Ok, you’re an IT Manager and you’re managing not only Cisco UC infrastructure, but all the other network infrastructure and security that your company needs to function. It’s critical for you that you can make the best possible decision in a timely manner. If you’re in a small organization, you’re basically on an island, everything is up to you. If you’re managing a large infrastructure in disparate locations and with multiple staff, you’re playing chess. But we’ll get to you next time.

Let’s start on the island, your island is growing and the IT department is understaffed. The owners of the company are focused on growing their business and they don’t have time for problems, but they also haven’t given you the tools to do what’s needed. Cisco was chosen because it provides a mature and complete solution, but you haven’t upgraded in a while and budget dollars are tight. In fact, you are more of a network person than voice focused, so you can keep everything floating, most of the time. But when a problem comes up, or a request from somewhere in the organization comes through, your day is sunk.

So how do you make the best of the resources you have today and cut down on response time?

Automation is a great option for you. The more things that you can set and forget, the better. When a user has a problem with their phone, wouldn’t it be nice to not have to leave your desk and solve it quickly then get back to whatever else you are doing at the moment? How about the report requests coming from Sales/HR/Marketing etc? Or maybe you need another way to communicate within the company, but don’t have budget to add Spark.

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First off, lets dig into some common problems with your end users and their desk phones. Maybe the President can’t figure out how to join a conference call, or there is a new employee and they started to push buttons and now their phone doesn’t work. As it is right now, you have to interrupt your day and walk across the building, or campus to solve the problem. But what if all you had to do was take control of their phone from your desk and push a button. What was a 20 minute task, just took you 20 seconds.

Uh-oh, somebody is making 3 hour calls to Timbuktu and HR needs proof. The Director of Sales is trying to understand why the new hire isn’t doing so well, can you show me his/her outbound calls for the past 10 weeks? Now lets see, if you take the data from the CAR tool can you find out exactly what it is that they are wanting, do it easily, and in a digestible format? How good are you with spreadsheets anyhow? Say goodbye to another day, because you are going to be in the office for a while. Or are you? Wouldn’t you rather build the report, send it out via email once a week, or be alerted when a specific call is made?

Last and probably least if we are being honest, people don’t really talk on the phone any more if they don’t have to, but you don’t have Spark yet. How do you let someone know that the network is going down without leaving another VM or email? Don’t worry, we’ll help you send that message and get a response back too.

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