MACs stand to be a lesson to potentially improve the old ways of getting things done and closing doors to prevent what falls through the cracks. While in Huntsville last year meeting again with ADTRAN for the event, Chris Thompson, Senior Product Manager and Samir Kakkar, IPT Product Manager of ADTRAN both affirmed what I heard about deleting an extension on the ADTRAN UC solution: Admins need only to delete the extension once in the ADTRAN solution. Here is the minor detail.The Moves & Changes are streamlined.
The old/existing problem of HR and the other departments in an organization is lessened. This is a lighter process when there is a new employee or an exiting one...while there may be other systems--that's par for the course--at least with these key assets, it's a simpler change process. (Improved Moves and Changes/Deletions Process.) I can recall the complaints/issues when I had +20,000 end points to worry with and a limited staff. I think that this solution (ADTRAN's New UC Suite) makes a very good case for improving this process further.
According to Chris and Samir:
When employee Matt Brown quits, the admin can simply delete his account in Active Directory. That will deactivate email, voicemail and any fax accounts associated with Matt Brown. In the initial release of the NetVanta Business Communications System (i.e. NV 7000 Series + NV UC Server), Matt's NV 7000 series user account would still exist but it would not have voicemail capability. So technically, the phone itself would not be disabled through Active Directory. If you are using the NetVanta Enterprise Communications Server with our NV 6355 devices, everything would be disabled. The key question regarding whether or not removing Matt Brown from Active Directory would remove him from other services and servers will depend on the other systems' capabilities and their configuration. That is outside the scope of the NetVanta UC devices.
I hope folks visualize what I'm seeing. Wouldn't it be cool and productive to get this change--even though it is "outside the scope" of the telephony solution, across multiple systems/platforms as a single change? Okay, so for the local IT person managing MACs following all those ITIL rules--the point is to improve the process. It's a minor detail, but carrying the MAC process beyond the deskphone deserves a little merit. How many times have former employee assets been found live and on the air, still being paid for! Please review the details and the processes with those "other services and servers," for any holes. How many changes occur does matter--but in more places than just the deskphone. Still, ADTRAN's solution is pretty slick proving that MACDs are simplified; it's the minor details that potentially leave you vulnerable.
