With Microsoft Teams racking up over 320 million users moving into 2024, it’s obvious that IT teams must put in a lot of hours and effort to manage their organizations’ M365 estate. Naturally, Microsoft offers a native solution to manage, view, and report back on the environment, but the reading feedback from administrators shows that the admin center is not user friendly, it eats up a lot of their time, and it’s hard to retrieve the data correctly.
These obstacles lead to a lack of efficient administration, leaving organizations with gaps in their data, lost ROI and potential security breaches. So having a solution like Clobba to remove these obstacles can increase productivity and data collection, assuring better insight into the quality of work.
What is the MS Teams Admin Center?
The Microsoft Teams Admin Center is a web-based portal that gives administrators control over their organization’s Teams environment. It allows IT administrators to manage settings, policies, and configurations for their organization’s Teams users, channels, and devices. You can access it here.
Before starting, make sure that you’re assigned one of the following roles:
- Global administrator
- Teams administrator
Benefits of the Microsoft Teams Admin Center
- Cost-Effectiveness: Utilizing the built-in features of the Teams Admin Center assures reduced costs
- Native Integration: Being a native tool, the Admin Center offers seamless integration with Teams and other Microsoft 365 services, ensuring compatibility and reliability
- Direct Control: Administrators have direct control over app management, including allowing or blocking specific apps directly from the Teams admin center
It’s a good solution for small businesses or new businesses, where there’s a limited budget. Or businesses that can run with only high-level analytics and reporting.
Limitations of the Microsoft Teams Admin Center
While the Admin Center offers a wide range of capabilities, it has its limitations. These limitations can impact the ability of administrators to generate reports, manage data usage, handle billing, and create dashboards.
This is where the organization’s leaders need to be made aware by the end users that free doesn’t mean without a cost. In contrast, while Clobba is license-based, companies win back the costs from the saved working hours, bridges in historical and real-time data gaps, user adoption, and license management, to name a few.
What are the differences between Clobba and Native MS Reporting
Here’s a quick look at key differences between the Clobba and the Admin Center features:
Let’s look a little deeper.
1. Dashboards and Wallboards
Microsoft natively offers:
- A call quality dashboard (CQD), for call and meeting quality, at an org-wide level with call records available within 30 minutes of the end of a call.
- Per-User Call Analytics for information about Teams calls and meetings from the last 30 days for each user in your Office 365 account
Clobba goes beyond that, showing both historical and real-time data in a customizable interface. It also gives you a more granular look into your data.
For example, in a call center, managers could set up wallboards for transparency, so the whole team can be aware of the numbers of calls in queue, available agents, average wait times, and more. This also opens gamification opportunities to boost agent performance even further.
2. Reporting
Some native reporting is available, such call quality, agent performance, and queue metrics. The caveat is that you must use Power BI to query and report your data, which is not that intuitive, nor does it allow you to drill through the data.
From a resource perspective, this means an organization will either
- Have an IT admin doing reporting for all departments, consuming huge amounts of their available time
- Grant admin rights to at least one person, with Power BI knowledge in each department, raising several security questions
In contrast, Clobba allows users to define any number of parameters in a unified view when generating reports so they’re relevant to each department’s specific reporting requirements. Reports can be run on an ad-hoc basis, saved as templates, or scheduled to run automatically with a user-defined frequency. Both summary and detailed reports are available, and the reports have drill through capabilities.
Due to the level of customization available, there is an unlimited number of reporting options. To help new users, there is a report assistant and even a report designer to ease the process.
As far as security is concerned, IT admins can grant access to the platform to any users from each department based on their specific needs. This completely removes the need for multiple people having access to the Microsoft Admin Center.
3. Voice recording
Microsoft Teams does not natively offer an automatic call recording feature, or the option to pause and resume recording during calls.
Clobba Voice Recorder covers these gaps. The Clobba VR modules also allows team leaders to listen in to live calls and call barge, to speak with both the agent and the caller.
4. License management
For organizations to properly manage their Microsoft licenses, a license manager would have to pull information from multiple data points, such as the Active Directory, the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) and Teams and run them through Power BI.
With Clobba License Adoption, managers have all the information in one place, from utilization to adoption. Because every business has a unique need within their M365 licensing plans, Clobba LA is fully customizable and configurable for their M365 rules.
In one single module organizations have relevant insights around active, duplicate, disabled, or inactive license which they can use to action any recommended license changes.
The bottom line is that Microsoft’s Teams Admin Center provides a great start with its management capabilities and built-in analytics and reports. But businesses requiring tailored reporting features, advanced analytics, historical audit tracking, or granular insights will not be fully covered by the Admin Center.
Clobba has successfully covered those gaps in reporting and analytics for more than 10 years and over 2,000 clients and partners.
