It’s hard to overstate how fast technology is driving business evolution — and Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams were once again a big part of that story in 2024. At Martello, we evolved right in step, adding new capabilities to Vantage DX and shedding new light on what enterprises need to manage the Microsoft digital experience.

Our previous blog explained why enterprises need help managing Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. If you can step in with a digital experience management (DEM) offer, you can create opportunities to expand into new markets, establish recurring revenue streams, cement customer loyalty and improve your margins. The challenge is that every enterprise is going to have its own specific pain points.

Few solutions are more essential to enterprise productivity and collaboration than Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. Microsoft 365 is the second most-used office suite in the world, with a 46% share of the market. Microsoft Teams had more than 320 million monthly active users by the start of 2024 and continues to grow, especially thanks to the integration of Copilot AI and value-adds like Teams Rooms and Teams Phone.

On November 25, 2024, Microsoft 365 users experienced widespread disruption identified as MO941162, impacting access to critical services like Teams, Outlook, Exchange, and SharePoint. While Microsoft worked to resolve the issue, the downtime once again highlighted the importance of proactive monitoring and management. For businesses relying on Microsoft 365, staying ahead of such outages isn’t just a convenience—it’s a necessity.

Let’s face it: when Microsoft Teams goes down, it’s a nightmare for IT teams with everyone asking ‘is there a Microsoft Teams outage’? Today’s Microsoft outage was a stark reminder of this reality. Organizations relying on Microsoft 365 were hit hard, scrambling to manage the fallout. But what if you didn’t have to scramble?

Whether your organization is migrating from a different platform or adopting a collaboration solution for the first time, choosing Microsoft Teams has clear benefits. It provides the opportunity to consolidate all your productivity and collaboration tools in a single environment — especially if you’re already using Microsoft 365 — and to take advantage of licensing cost benefits. But migrating to any new software is also a precarious time, and Teams is no exception.

Microsoft Teams has become one of the most essential tools for collaboration and communication in the past few years. However, because of its now critical nature, Teams issues can cause big productivity problems in your business. Worse still, when those issues go unreported, IT departments are left well and truly in the dark.

Organizations have invested billions in tools to make hybrid work as effective, productive and rewarding as it can be. That includes spending on premium solutions like dedicated Microsoft Teams Rooms that provide rich communication and collaboration capabilities. A single Teams Room can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $60,000. The higher that price tag climbs, the more pressure IT departments are under to ensure seamless performance and an exceptional user experience.

In most organizations when there’s an issue with Microsoft Teams Phone, “who you gonna call” is corporate IT. But Teams Phone brings unique challenges to troubleshooting and managing the user experience that IT isn’t necessarily equipped to face. A few key tools and capabilities can make all the difference.

Scale is a perennial challenge for most IT teams. While organizations expect the same performance and experience whether 500 users are accessing essential applications or 50,000, IT headcount rarely increases in proportion with organizational growth. This often leaves IT departments overtaxed and pressed to triage the most urgent concerns. But even that requires good data to inform decisions — which can be in short supply.