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Onboarding with Included Benefits for Azure Communications Gateway

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Azure Communications Gateway includes a project team for helping you design and set up your network for success. This service includes a customer success program and onboarding service called Included Benefits. We work with your team to enable rapid and effective solution design and deployment. The program includes tailored guidance from Azure for Operators engineers, using proven practices and architectural guides. If you're not eligible for Included Benefits or you require more support, discuss your requirements with your Microsoft sales representative.

The Operator Connect and Teams Phone Mobile programs also require an onboarding partner who manages the necessary changes to the Operator Connect or Teams Phone Mobile environments and coordinates with Microsoft Teams on your behalf. The Azure Communications Gateway Included Benefits project team fulfills this role, but you can choose a different onboarding partner to coordinate with Microsoft Teams on your behalf.

Eligibility for Included Benefits and alternatives

Included Benefits is available to operator customers who:

  • Have an active paid Azure subscription.
  • Have a defined project using Azure Communications Gateway with intent to deploy. A defined project has an executive sponsor, committed customer/partner resources, established success metrics, and clear timelines for start and end of the project.
  • Are located in a country/region supported by Azure Communications Gateway. Engagements are in English (although we might offer engagements in your local language, depending on the availability of our teams).

There's no cost to you for the Included Benefits program.

If your requirements exceed the scope of the program or you fail to meet your responsibilities, at any point we might ask you to:

  • Contact your Microsoft sales representative to arrange extra services.
  • Find your own partner able to meet your needs (for example a System Integrator).

Process overview for Included Benefits

Azure for Operators partners with you to drive your business outcomes and success. Our goal is to empower you to deliver a new breed of solutions that meet the fast-changing needs of business today and in the future. To achieve this goal, Included Benefits takes a solution-centric approach, providing you with design principles and tools for your solutions: we work with you from design to deployment in a production environment. When you use Included Benefits to help accelerate and deploy solutions on Azure, there are three phases involved in the process:

Phase 1: Discovery

Once you've identified your Azure Communications Gateway project, you can ask your account team to nominate your project for Included Benefits. The Included Benefits team works with you to identify key stakeholders, understand the vision/goals, and assess the architectural needs for problems you're trying to solve.

In this phase, we establish eligibility, scope and conditions of success for the project.

Phase 2: Solution enablement

If your project is approved, the Included Benefits team carries out architectural design reviews and delivers solution enablement guidance by sharing proven practices and design principles for the solution.

A typical project might include the following engagements:

  • Technical talks and workshops: subject matter deep dives and best practices to accelerate your deployment. These meetings often provide an overview of available documentation and admin consoles.
  • Review of your architecture and design with Azure Communications Gateway.
  • Checkpoint meetings: weekly or biweekly touchpoints to ensure that your deployment is progressing to completion.

Phase 3: Deployment

The Included Benefits team supports your in-house resources (your teams and people) or a partner to successfully deploy Azure Communications Gateway into production.

A typical project might include the following engagements:

  • Integration testing: support and advice for troubleshooting of issues identified with the solution.
  • Help gathering artifacts for Microsoft Teams Operator Connect Certification (if applicable)

Scope of Included Benefits

Included Benefits is aimed at standard deployments of Azure Communications Gateway. It covers:

  • Initial deployment of Azure Communications Gateway and integration into operator's production network
  • If you're launching Microsoft Teams Operator Connect, fulfilling the role of an Operator Connect Accelerator by guiding and supporting you through the onboarding process for Microsoft Teams Operator Connect.

Responsibilities with Included Benefits

We provide:

  • Guidance on:
    • Enablement of Azure Communications Gateway (including remote support).
    • Configuration tasks and integration testing.
    • Azure platform configuration.
  • Architectural guidance and design principles for eligible solutions.
  • Resources committed to making your project successful.

Your responsibilities include:

  • Providing someone as a single point-of-contact to assist us in collecting information and coordinating your resources (your teams and people). This person must have the authority to review and approve deliverables, and otherwise ensure that these responsibilities are carried out.
  • Providing timely responses to questions, issues, and dependencies to ensure the project finishes on time.
  • Creating architectural documentation and technical documentation specific to your organization.
  • Hands-on administration, support, and deployment on Azure.
  • Producing any reports, presentations, and meeting minutes that are specific to your organization.
  • Overall program management and project management for your resources.
  • Managing your deployment, third-party suppliers (for example, any system integrators or provisioning partners), and your suppliers' equipment, as necessary.
  • Providing test numbers, devices and testing from your network to find integration issues.
  • Demos, POCs or extra testing specific to your organization.

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