If you’re moving from Avaya Communications Manager (CM) to Avaya Cloud Office (ACO), Rick Gibbons has some advice about navigating the changes. He shared his company’s experience in an IAUG Wired presentation, “CM to ACO, Top 10 Differences for Users and Admins.”
“ACO includes voicemail, video and texting, plus all the advantage of the cloud,” said Gibbons, who is telecommunications manager for Nelson Mullins, one of the nation’s largest law firms. Since he started there in 2000, the company has grown six offices and individual System 75 systems to a converged CM 6 environment with more than 40 locations. In 2020, the firm converted its CM system to ACO in a migration that involved 2,100 users.
“While we did a proof of concept, most issues didn’t come up until we started the roll-out,” Gibbons said, before outlining ten key differences.
1. Accessibility. Unlike CM, administrators can access and manage their ACO systems from anywhere. “I’ve made changes from home with my tablet,” Gibbons said. “Plus, users can administer their own accounts, and that’s meant a huge reduction in help desk calls.”
2. Visibility. ACO allows managers to filter users by location and troubleshoot issues more easily, Gibbons said. “You can see the status of the phones in one office, for instance. You can also see the name, number, and serial/mac number of that phone, so you have all the information to find a problem.”
3. Analytics. “This is another area where ACO really shines,” said Gibbons. “With ACO you can get the call quality for every call as well as information in call queues.” Unlike CM, whose data is purged daily, ACO saves all data for a year. That allows admins to go back and track any inbound or outbound call. “You can filter by location so you can see trends and take action before they become problems,” he added.
4. Hunt groups/call queue routing. Gibbons said it took for more to create holiday tables in ACO than CM, once that was done the day-to-day management was easier. For instance, a receptionist doesn’t have to take the system in and out of night rules, and if an employee is sick, those calls can easily be routed to someone else. Since the firm’ offices are primarily in the Southeast U.S., preparing for a hurricane is easier with ACO. An office can route calls to our main office, and the route will automatically turn off when the office reopens, Gibbons said. “That was much harder in CM, using vectors.”
5. Outbound call routing. With CM, it took time to prepare custom routing and trunk groups. With ACO, it’s easier to determine what calls a user can make, such as U.S. or international.
“ACO has blacklisted several countries know for hackers, but you can add them to your whitelist if your users need to call them,” he said.
6. Call coverage. Gibbons said the firm’s users miss getting call details from CM, as it’s more generic with ACO. “But with ACO, we don’t have to set up the user’s coverage,” he added. “A call can ring both the lawyer and administrative assistant, and it’s easy to add a co-worker as well.”
7. Bridged call appearance. “This is a great feature in CM, as that admin assistant can answer or place calls for attorneys,” Gibbons said. “ACO doesn’t have this, so you have to use a shared or delegated line.” At the law firm, Gibbons uses ring group so the two lines ring at the same time, so the admin cam answer the call. It can then be put in a private park group (a feature Gibbons’ team added), and the attorney can hit that group and then pick up the call.
8. Conference call from phone. “We installed an app so transfers could go to up to seven people,” Gibbons said.
9. Block calls. To stop incoming calls from unwanted numbers, a workaround on CM was necessary, said Gibbons. But in ACO, administrators and users can just highlight the bad number and hit “block.” Users can manage that themselves, and they can also unblock a number at any time.
10. Change station/user. With CM, you don’t see a change on the phone, Gibbons said. With ACO all changes are saved to the core software, so they’re in place going forward.
Looking at the differences for users, Gibbons said there are some feature gaps, but self-administration is a huge gain. “Our users love being able to make changes to their own accounts,” he said. “IAUG has an active community of ACO users and we are using IAUG’s feature request tracker to provide input to Avaya.”
In general, ACO is easier to access, provides more information and is easier to learn, added Gibbons. “Now, I have time to focus on analytics and provide more value to our company than spending my time making changes.”