# What Moving to UCaaS Actually Involves > What a UCaaS migration involves, in order: the inventory taken first, what the decision turns on, why porting sets the schedule, and the first month after. *Source: https://trybussolutions.com/ucaas-transformation-journey/ · Trybus Solutions · Chattanooga, TN · 423-633-1817 · info@trybussolutions.com* - [Home](https://trybussolutions.com/) - Company[About us](https://trybussolutions.com/about-us/) - [Careers](https://trybussolutions.com/careers/) - Solutions[Collaboration](https://trybussolutions.com/collaboration-unified-communications/) - [Networking & Connectivity Solutions](https://trybussolutions.com/networking-connectivity/) - [Cybersecurity Solutions](https://trybussolutions.com/cybersecurity/) - [Cloud & Infrastructure](https://trybussolutions.com/cloud-and-infrastructure/) - [Governance, Risk & Compliance](https://trybussolutions.com/governance-risk-compliance/) - [Digital Workplace](https://trybussolutions.com/digital-workplace/) - Services[Implementation & Migration](https://trybussolutions.com/implementation-migration/) - 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In practice it is a sequence of dependencies, and most of them are discovered during the work. The items that set the calendar are the ones the project does not control: number porting, carrier contract dates, and the devices that cannot follow the users into the cloud. ## What you inventory before you decide anything Platform selection is not worth discussing until the estate is written down. Users and sites are the straightforward part, because licensing is counted per user and readiness is assessed per site. The rest is harder to see, and the gaps are the useful output. - **Sites, and the network path at each one.** Circuit type, bandwidth, whether a second path exists, and what happens to calls in progress when the primary fails. Voice quality complaints after a migration are usually decided here, on the same ground as [network and connectivity design](https://trybussolutions.com/networking-connectivity/). - **Users, grouped by how they work.** A desk phone, a software client, a shared handset on a floor, a headset in a queue. Those carry different licenses, different hardware and different training. - **Every analog device.** Fax machines, elevator telephones, fire alarm communicators, gate intercoms, overhead paging, area-of-refuge stations. These are found by walking the building with the facilities manager and reading the carrier invoice line by line. An export from the phone system will miss most of them. - **Call flows as they are answered, not as they were designed.** Auto attendants, hunt groups, after-hours and holiday schedules, shared lines, delegated answering, park and page. Export the configuration, then sit with the people who answer the phones. The two accounts rarely match. - **Integrations that dial, record or notify.** Contact center, recording and archiving where a [regulatory obligation](https://trybussolutions.com/governance-risk-compliance/) requires it, faxing, mass notification, screen pops from a record system, and any application with a dial-out function nobody has examined in years. - **Carrier contracts and their end dates.** Trunk agreements, individual analog lines, and the termination liability attached to each. Auto-renewal dates set the target date on more of these projects than any technical factor does. ## What the decision actually turns on Selection processes spend most of their time on feature comparison and very little on the questions that decide whether the migration is straightforward. Assume the major platforms handle ordinary calling competently. Trybus does not publish comparisons between manufacturers, and a comparison written by somebody else describes a generic estate. Yours is the one being migrated. - **Where the current platform sits in its support lifecycle.** A published end-of-support date turns an optional project into a scheduled one. - **What the estate contains that cannot move.** The analog and life safety population sets the cost and the sequence, and it is the item most often priced after the contract is signed. - **What each site can carry, and what happens when it cannot.** A site with one circuit and no second path needs a different design from a site with two. That difference belongs in the design. It surfaces anyway, on the first day the circuit drops. - **How licensing lines up with how people work.** An estate with many occasional users, shared devices or seasonal staff prices very differently under different models, and that gap is usually wider than any feature difference under discussion. The honest version is that platform choice is rarely the risk here. Discovery is. A migration plan written before the analog and call flow inventory is finished will be wrong about its own critical path, and that includes a plan written by us. ## How the numbers move, and why porting sets the calendar A platform can be built and tested in a fraction of the time the numbers take to move, which is why the port dates become the project plan. A port request is validated against the record the losing carrier holds: account number, billing telephone number, service address, authorized contact. A mismatch returns a rejection rather than a question, and every rejection costs a cycle. Request the customer service record early and correct it first. Carriers treat a handful of numbers differently from a main number with a full range of direct dial numbers behind it. The second kind is scheduled work, and the schedule belongs to the carrier losing the business. Partial ports deserve particular care: the billing telephone number identifies the account itself, so it moves last or the account is restructured first. Porting cannot be rehearsed. Build and test the platform on temporary numbers, train users on it, then move live numbers onto a system that already works. The old trunks stay in place across the port window so inbound calls still have somewhere to land. ## The devices that cannot move Every estate has endpoints that never become cloud users. They belong to facilities rather than to IT, they are found late, and they are the most common reason a site cutover is deferred. An analog terminal adapter presents a standard analog port to the old device and carries the traffic over the network, which is enough for a doorbell, a paging amplifier or an intercom. Real-time fax is sensitive to delay and packet loss in a way a voice call tolerates, so the durable options there are a fax service that moves the document digitally, or a retained line for the partner who insists on the machine. Life safety is not settled inside the calling platform. Elevator telephones, fire alarm communicators and area-of-refuge stations are governed by code and by the authority having jurisdiction for that building. Whether a particular adapter is acceptable, and what has to keep working when the building loses power, is answered by the alarm vendor and the inspector. Their answer sets the design and the plan follows it. Most of these devices end up on an adapter, handed to a service provider who takes the requirement over on its own terms, or left on copper deliberately. That last group carries a monthly cost and reduces the saving the project was justified on, so it belongs in the business case from the first draft. ## What the first month after cutover looks like The first week produces a burst of tickets, and they follow a pattern close enough to anticipate. Outbound caller identification showing the wrong number for a department. Transfers landing in a voicemail box that belonged to somebody who left two years ago. A queue that behaves correctly until the first evening, because the after-hours schedule was copied from a configuration that had drifted away from what the business does. One-way audio at a single site, which is almost always a firewall rule or the path the media takes. Two things are worth checking deliberately. The first is emergency call registration, because the location that accompanies a call is tied to where a user sits and people move desks constantly in the weeks after a cutover. The second is the list of users who have never signed in. A client nobody opened is a training gap, and it arrives later disguised as a complaint about the platform. Nothing is retired in the first month. The old platform stays reachable, the old trunks stay up, and both bills are paid for a period that belongs in the budget from the beginning. Decommissioning happens once traffic on the old system has reached zero and stayed there, and once somebody has established which applications still dial through it. Whether your team runs the result afterwards or it moves to [managed services and support](https://trybussolutions.com/managed-services-and-support/) is a separate agreement worth settling before the cutover. ## When the move is not worth making Some estates should do nothing yet. A platform refreshed in the last few years, still supported, with licensing paid through and no carrier contract date approaching, does not need this project. The migration costs a full discovery, a porting program, a device conversion and a month of raised support effort, and much of what it delivers may already be sitting unused on the system in place. The support date or the contract date will give the project a reason soon enough. The same judgment applies site by site. A site with one internet circuit, no second path and a largely analog device population makes a poor first candidate. Sequencing exists so that those sites go last, on better information. Where are you in the journey? Most organizations arrive at UCaaS mid-estate, with some sites on premises and some already in the cloud. A phased plan handles that better than a single cutover date. ## What an assessment produces The build sits inside [implementation and migration](https://trybussolutions.com/implementation-migration/), and the platform design sits with the wider [collaboration and unified communications](https://trybussolutions.com/collaboration-unified-communications/) work. An assessment establishes the inventory above, the porting sequence, the disposition of each analog device and the contract dates that bound the schedule, then produces a plan with dates that hold up under questioning. Where it concludes that the system you have should stay where it is for another year, that is the finding we hand back. [Request an assessment](https://trybussolutions.com/contact-us/) ## About the Author **Brandon Kinsey** VP, Collaboration Solutions Trybus Solutions ## Keep reading - [Unified CommunicationsWhat is UC? Why Does Your Business Need It?8 min read](https://trybussolutions.com/what-is-uc-why-does-your-business-need-it/) - [CollaborationCisco Desk Phone 9800 Series: What Decides the Model Mix7 min read](https://trybussolutions.com/actionable-insights-for-your-business/) - [MigrationAnalog Endpoints and Cloud Calling8 min read](https://trybussolutions.com/analog-endpoints-cloud-calling-migration/) ## Build a UCaaS plan that fits a mixed estate Our engineers sequence the migration site by site, keep on-premises and cloud users calling each other throughout, and retire the old platform only when nothing depends on it. Or call [423-633-1817](tel:+14236331817) · [info@trybussolutions.com](mailto:info@trybussolutions.com)