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Unify² PowerView 3.0 Overview

PowerView is a comprehensive reporting and billing solution for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2. It comes with a wide range of reports that enable businesses to track and optimize their overall Lync deployment, quantify and track Return on Investment in a clear and defensible format, and produce billing or charge-back reports based on Lync usage across as many or few Lync features or modalities as a customer requires.

PowerView 3.0 includes a scalable, comprehensive data warehouse for Lync Server 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2 that aggregates data collected from Call Detail Records, Active Directory, carrier billing rate tables and other data sources, providing powerful views of communications data optimized for business reporting purposes. PowerView effectively complements the raw transactional data contained in the Lync CDR databases and provides a rich view of the data that's correlated with the enterprise's organizational and geographical topologies, enabling enterprises to leverage a comprehensive set of PowerView reports or easily develop custom views of business data related to Lync.

PowerView 3.0 adds a wide range of new reports, including Lync adoption tracking reports, common area phone usage reports, billing summary reports with drilldowns to the individual user and call detail level, carrier-billing based on precise and complex carrier rates, departmental billing summaries, top users for total usage and costs, top users of conferencing, top users of call forwarding, user device/version usage reports and individual response group activity reports.

Lync Administrators can leverage the drilldown reports, and a rich set of report hyperlinks to browse overall usage, view usage by department or geography, sort by total usage or costs, and then navigate to individual user reports and view details of individual calls and conferences. PowerView also supports a full set of automatic subscription and report caching functions, enabling on demand and routing reporting delivery through web page, SharePoint workspace, e-mail, file share, or other distribution mechanisms. Daily, weekly, monthly or other complex report scheduling is easy, from automatically delivering departmental billing summaries, to quarterly business reviews, down to individual courtesy reminder messages if a user exceeds appropriate usage standards or limits.

In addition, PowerView was designed from the ground up to incorporate Role Based Access Control, enabling easy segmentation and protection of private data, including anonymization and data retention features to help meet privacy and legal compliance initiatives.

PowerView 3.0 is easy to install and manage, leveraging the same infrastructure as Lync, including SQL Server and SQL Server Reporting Services. Unify² Consulting and Engineering services can help enterprises customize existing reports or implement new reports to meet their unique requirements.

To obtain an evaluation copy, please contact: USsales@unifysquare.com

Numerous Prepackaged Reports

Here are a few samples of the more than 30 reports released with PowerView 3.0:

User Trends:This report combines information from the CDR database and Active Directory, building up a history of the deployment. The report tracks users who are enabled to use Enterprise Voice and IM/Conferencing as well as users who are actively using the features, enabling enterprises to track to see how long it takes users to start using the features once they are enabled. Geography and organizational filters can be used enabling enterprises to track how the deployment is going in different countries, regions, departments or groups.

Conference Savings Reports:  For many enterprises, leveraging Lync’s conferencing capabilities to replace hosted conferencing service usually leads to significant cost savings. PowerView 3.0 enables enterprises to define a per-participant minute conference savings rate and then track savings rates by month or the accumulated savings over time. This saving information can be leveraged by the Lync deployment manager to demonstrate realized savings and provide the motivation for expanding the Lync conferencing rollout across the enterprise. The graph below shows an enterprise that starts leveraging Lync Conferencing in June and then begins a large-scale rollout in September.

PowerView 3.0 Benefits:

Track Lync Usage: Track the deployment of IM, voice, video, conferencing and application sharing across your enterprise, helping to identify issues with deployment, adoption and even training or corporate culture and use cases between departments, locations and job functions.

Report simultaneously on both Lync Server 2010 and OCS 2007 R2: Report on your complete Lync/OCS usage in a consistent fashion before, during and after an upgrade to Lync 2010. Use PowerView 3.0’s Lync Adoption report to see which users are actively using Lync clients.

Configure PowerView 3.0’s billing models to meet your specific billing requirements: Implement billing based on flat-fee, metered usage by modality, PSTN carrier and/or ACP conferencing costs.

Implement billing by user, department, division and/or business unit: Assign costs to individual users and roll them up to whichever level of organization makes sense for your business.

Justify your investment via defensible ROI calculations: Track the quantifiable savings realized over time by leveraging Lync, including conferencing, with a sophisticated and customizable travel avoidance calculation.

Lower Device Costs: Track and categorize call quality and satisfaction across devices, sites and groups, and detect patterns for future planning or negotiations with vendors and suppliers. Optimize your device purchases, maintenance and device life cycle management.

Track feature usage and adoption: Track use of features and capabilities, such as federated partner communications, remote usage, application sharing and response group calls. Identify training and remediation opportunities.

Manage and analyze deployment and usage metrics using your existing organizational and/or geographical divisions: Access reports based on the enterprise’s unique organization and geography hierarchies.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

Q: What is PowerView 3.0?
PowerView 3.0 is the latest release of the comprehensive reporting and billing solution for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS) from Unify², a global leader in Microsoft Unified Communications deployment, optimization and customization. PowerView comes with a wide range of reports that track and optimize the overall Lync deployment, track Return on Investment, and produce billing or charge-back reports based on Lync usage.   

Q: Which version(s) of Lync and Office Communications Server is PowerView 3.0 supported on?
PowerView 3.0 is supports both Lync Server 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2. The PowerView database can contain data from both releases. Additionally PowerView can simultaneously import data from both Lync Server 2010 and OCS 2007 R2 (where different pools are running different versions).  

Q: We’re running SQL Server 2005 with OCS. Can we still run PowerView 3.0?
Yes. Although PowerView 3.0 leverages SQL Server 2008 (or SP1) for the PowerView database, however it can read data from OCS deployments that use SQL Server 2005 R2 for the OCS back end and CDR databases.

Q: We’re running SQL Server 2008 R1 with OCS. Can we still run PowerView 3.0?
Yes. PowerView 3.0 supports both SQL Server 2008 (typically used by OCS 2007 R2) and SQL Server 2008 SP1 (used by Lync Server 2010).   

Q: How is the PowerView 3.0 Data Warehouse different from the Lync’s Call Detail Record database?
PowerView 3.0 includes a scalable, comprehensive data warehouse for Lync Server 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2 that aggregates data collected from CDR, Active Directory, carrier billing rate tables and other data sources, providing powerful views of communications data optimized for business reporting purposes. PowerView effectively complements the raw transactional data contained in the Lync CDR databases and provides a rich view of the data that's correlated with the enterprise's organizational and geographical topologies, enabling enterprises to leverage a comprehensive set of PowerView reports or easily develop custom views of business data related to Lync. 

Specifically designed for enterprise class Lync 2010 deployment scale and performance, PowerView 3.0 is a data warehouse that reports on the overall operation and management of Lync across the entire Lync deployment over an unlimited period of time. Unlike the CDR database reporting that is limited to the data in a single CDR (Call Detail Record) database for a fixed period of time (60 days be default), PowerView 3.0 collects data from all of the Lync’s CDR databases and correlates it with corporate information from Active Directory and a rich set of enterprise-specific billing, chargeback, and cost savings information, enabling rich enterprise-wide reporting that enables enterprises to manage their Lync deployment in a manner where they can track their business needs and objectives.
 
PowerView 3.0 reads in user configuration information from Active Directory and imports enterprise organizational and geographical information from either Active Directory or another data source; it then correlates this information with the user’s SIP and TEL URIs in the individual CDR records. If Carrier Billing is enabled, PowerView stores and correlates carrier billing information for each PSTN call, enabling enterprises to assign carrier costs to specific users and their departments. Additionally PowerView 3.0 can associate geographical location information with each PSTN call, enabling enterprises to easily see where calls are being placed to or coming from. 

All of this information is stored in PowerView’s data warehouse, enabling enterprises to view this data in a wide set of reports. So besides seeing a CDR record with a SIP URI, a PSTN phone number and call duration, PowerView pulls in user, departmental, geographical, carrier cost and other information, enabling enterprises to see various calling patterns. Additionally, PowerView, by default, does not purge this information. Instead the data is stored in PowerView enabling enterprises to view historical trends over months or years. Future versions of PowerView will enable this data to persist even when new versions of OCS/Lync Server are deployed. Alternately, Lync’s CDR databases, by default, are purged every 60 days and best practices typically recommend keeping these databases limited in size in order to not impact the production system.

Q: How many servers do I need to run PowerView 3.0?
PowerView 3.0 is designed to run on one server. This server runs all components of PowerView 3.0, including either SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services and SQL Server 2008 R2 Integration Services (for Lync 2010), or SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services and SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (for OCS 2007 R2). Users access reports from a wide range of browsers on any network-connected computer. Enterprises can choose to run the different components of PowerView 3.0 on different servers. For example, the PowerView 3.0 database can be run on one server or co-located with other SQL Server databases while the SQL Server Reporting Services component of PowerView can be run on a separate computer.
 
Q: Can I install PowerView 3.0 on a Monitoring server?
Yes, if the Monitoring Server is running SQL Server 2008 SP1 for Lync 2010 or SQL Server 2008 for OCS 2007 R2.  However, for large scale deployments, it is recommended that PowerView 3.0 be installed on a separate server, thus separating it from the Lync production environment.

Q: Can I run PowerView 3.0 on a virtual server?
Yes, PowerView 3.0 can be run on a virtual server using Microsoft’s Hyper-V or other certified virtualization technologies.

Q: How can I customize PowerView 3.0 for our corporate data organizational topologies?
PowerView 3.0 can be easily customized to enable enterprises to view reports based on their own corporate data organization topologies. For example, Lync deployment trend reports can be viewed by any geographical organization such as region, country, city, campus or building. Billing reports can be organized the same way required by corporate finance, whether it’s by company, department, business unit or division. PowerView, through its data Integration services, can import the enterprise’s business structure hierarchy and geography hierarchy, mapping data to PowerView from either Active Directory or a wide variety of other data sources. Each of these classification hierarchies can have up to four levels in its hierarchical organization. These geography and organization classification hierarchies are used by PowerView for drill downs and report filters.   
 
Q: What billing options does PowerView 3.0 have?
PowerView 3.0 has the following billing modes:

• Flat-Fee Billing: Users are billed a monthly flat-rate for using IM/Conferencing and/or Enterprise Voice.
• Usage-Based Billing: Users are billed a per-message, per minute, or per participant minute for using IM, voice, video, application sharing or conferencing.
• Carrier Billing: Users are billed a per-minute charge for outbound PSTN calls based on the number they dial, the gateway and carrier the call is placed out of. Different carrier billing tables can be used in different regions. One carrier may be used in the USA while another carrier may be used in Germany.

Enterprises can choose any combination of the above billing models and then configure the rates for each mode. User and departmental bills will then be produced based on the configured billing modes.

Q: Can PowerView 3.0 bill for all modes of communication.
Yes, PowerView 3.0 can be configured to bill for IM, Voice, Video, Conferencing and Application/Data sharing.

Q: Can PowerView 3.0 bill for PSTN calls?
Yes, PowerView 3.0 supports a powerful and flexible carrier billing mode that can be used in any combination with other PowerView billing models. Carrier-specific billing tables are associated with gateways that enable a per-minute charge based on the dialed number pattern. This enables enterprises to bill different rates for calls to specific countries, mobile phones and satellite phones. These charges are assigned to the user making the call and are included in organization/department bills.

Q: How does PowerView 3.0 bill for Conference Calls?
PowerView 3.0 can be configured to charge users a flat-rate for using conferences. Additionally or alternately, enterprises can configure usage-based billing, where PowerView bills the organizer of the conference a per-participant minute rate for each participant for using audio/video or application/data sharing.

Q: How can we bill different departments for Lync and telecom costs?
PowerView 3.0 produces detailed departmental level and individual user bills. Organizational and user information is pulled down from Active Directory (or another source) and maintained in PowerView, enabling bills to reflect the current state of the organization for the current billing period or previous states for historical billing purposes. Departmental bills can be produced each month, where the bills contain detailed information on the summary charges and a summary of user’s individual charges. Authorized departmental personnel can then drill down and view the detail for both individual calls and conference calls. Enterprises can configure PowerView to automatically create these bills on a monthly basis and then have them emailed to select individuals.

Q: How can PowerView 3.0 help us detect misuse of Lync resources?
PowerView 3.0 includes a set of “top call” reports, which can be filtered and sorted to find interesting usage trends for individual users or phone numbers. For example, you can configure a report to find out which users are using the most resources. Telecom analysts can then filter and sort the records as well as drill down and look at call details to determine the patterns of the calls. 

Q: How can we restrict access on reporting and billing information?
PowerView 3.0 supports a rich security model that leverages SQL Server Reporting Service’s role-based security model, which controls access to individual reports or a collection of reports. Administrators can assign users or groups of users to a role, which grants detailed privileges on what a user can view and what operations they can perform. The PowerView documentation describes how to implement a security model by using four defined roles (Basic User, Power User, Content Manager, and PowerView Administrator) which give users various levels of privileges. Administrators can leverage this model or are free to develop their own security model possibly leveraging existing groups.

Q: Can I subscribe to a PowerView 3.0 report?
Yes, PowerView 3.0 supports a rich subscription model. Users can subscribe to specific reports and have them emailed to them or saved into a directory for later viewing. Users can specify values for each parameter for a report as well as the time when the report is to be run.

Q: Can I export the billing information?
Yes, PowerView 3.0 can export data, including billing data, in a variety of formats, including Comma-Separated Files (CSF), Excel, Word, MHTML and PDF.

Q: How is by PowerView 3.0 licensed?
PowerView 3.0 is licensed for enterprises based on the Lync seats deployed in your enterprise. Please contact USsales@unifysquare.com for a quote.

Q: How can I learn more and arrange for a PowerView 3.0 evaluation / trial?
Contact USsales@unifysquare.com  to arrange for a demonstration or a trial.