When you first roll out Teams or planning to adapt it, the Network Planner is great tool for you to start. Network Planner can helps you to determine network requirements for your organization when using Microsoft Teams across your organization. Because if you want to deploy a new services or technology you would like to utilize the maximum resource it required in which to generate the better results right? Essentially, you using Network Planner to re-create an abstract office environment and simulate the Teams usage, then to calculates your estimated network requirements for deploying Teams to your physical locations.
Before you heading further, you need to know some basic network requirements for Microsoft Teams:
Now, let’s start to using the Network Planner tool in action. Image you are an IT staff in a company, for example called AugmaStudio (for the convenience using my website name), a multi-international company based in Shanghai, have several branch offices at LA, Paris, Geneva, Sofia. Mexico and demanding to adapt Microsoft Teams.
Add a network plan
Since you’ve had all of these details info from above table, then you can start to create a network plan. Follow below steps to create a network plan:
- Access Microsoft Teams admin center from https://admin.microsoft.com
2. Login with your AAD account. (Be sure you have Teams Communications Administrator role assigned, better to have Teams Services Admin role)
3. Expand the left side panel > scroll-down to find “Planning” > Network Planner > click “Add” button under “Network plans” section.
4. Enter “AugmaStudio” for the “Network plan name” and make a simple description > click “Apply”.
5. Then you’ve created a network plan and its displayed under the “network plans” section.
Create custom personas
Next, we need to create some custom personas to simulate our end users. By default, there three of build-in personas: Teams Room system / Remote worker / Office worker. And you can only have total of 6 personas means beside those three build-in personas you may only create extra three of them. And build-in personas are unable to deleted.
Follow below steps to create three of custom persons to fit our needs:
- Click “Add” under personas section > Enter the name with description for this persona > toggle the switch to turn on all feature (this persona is for office with PSTN) > click “Apply”.
2. Repeat last steps to create rest of 2 personas. (office without PSTN and Calling only)
Okay, all personas are created as below.
Add sites to your network plan
Have you forgot those five of branch offices with HQ? Now it’s time to using previously table to building our network plan. Follow below steps to create six sites for each of office:
- Go back to Network Planner > click the “AugmaStudio” network plan > click “add a network site”.
2. Then using the previously table to create six of sites.
All sites detail has been inputted as below screenshot shows. As every office are running independently we don’t need to toggle “ExpressRoute” nor “Connect to WAN” options.
Generating report
Of course, we’re reaching the final steps – generating the report. Follow below steps to generate a report:
- Back to Network Planner option from the left panel > click the created network plan (in our case is AugmaStudio) > then click “Report”.
2. Click “Start a report” under the report section.
3. Give a name of the report and describe it.
4. Click “Generate report” to view your estimated bandwidth needs. By default, if you do not adding any of your custom personas which using these three of default personas created by Microsoft, the number will be distributed automatically with 80% office worker and 20% remote worker.
After the report was generated, you could export it to a PDF file and switch it to a chart view for more intuitive.
The default value for allowed bandwidth is 30%, you may tweak this value and clicking “Run report” to view the results, see below example when I reduced the “Allowed bandwidth” down to 10%, the Mexico office being highlight in red to indicate that need more bandwidth.
Note, to use Network Planner from Microsoft Teams admin center, you must be assigned with either Global Administrator, Teams Administrator or Teams Communications Administrator (the last one is the fit for apply principle of least privilege). By create a report generated via Network Planner you can clearly understand the bandwidth requirements for each of your offices, and make adjustments accordingly to the recommendations.
