Unified Communications

Unified Communications (UC)  - Let’s Explore….

The history of UC dates back to the 1980’s and has been evolving rapidly over the past decade.  While the technologies involving UC are important, what is of even great importance is understanding how your organization will take advantage of these technologies.  The teXium team looks beyond the “techy” stuff, and to what is vital for you – your people, your applications, your business. 

See below for more information on the technology and the benefits surrounding UC, and then contact the teXium team to begin exploring the best options available for your company.

What is Unified Communications?

Unified communications is the concept of taking all the ways we communicate and seamlessly integrating them into a single interface. For businesses, this translates into pulling communication modes like voice, video conferencing, instant messaging, advanced mobility, email, voicemail, fax, presence and collaboration capabilities into one platform.  The technology allows you to create powerful connections between people, both inside and outside your organization, for the purpose of greater productivity. 

Now on-site and remote users alike can see who is available, and choose how best to reach them. With less time spent playing phone tag, everyone has more time for the real business at hand.

Top Five Benefits of Unified Communications

1. Collaboration. Unified communications (UC) features a venue where coworkers, business partners, and clients can come together and collaborate using advanced data sharing and communications devices. You can exchange ideas, share data and documents instantly, edit a document “live,” and more. Examples of virtual collaboration tools include online white boards and a shared document repository. UC is often referred to as unified communications and collaboration, which indicates its role in facilitating virtual teamwork.

2. Communication. UC enhances business communications by bringing all available devices and modalities under one roof. The implications go beyond access--with UC, you can seamlessly transition among all available communications modalities “live.” With a click of a mouse you can escalate an instant message (IM) exchange into a phone call or even a conference call, bringing others on board. The graphic user interface facilitates the transition.

3. Access. Because UC operates across all communications devices, users enjoy unprecedented remote access to the system. Connect to your company’s internal network via wireless using your PDA, laptop, netbook, or home computer. Unified messaging ensures that all your messages--voice, email, and others--reach you in your chosen format.

4. Business process integration. UC expands the integration between data and communications applications, promoting continuity across all business processes. Via the UC interface you can access all available business process applications--enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), and other data management and reporting utilities. 

5. Presence. A unique innovation of UC technology is the real-time presence interface, which allows you to view the availability of all other users and their communication preferences. This cuts wasted time tracking down available users and leaving messages. For example, a customer support specialist can use the presence application to identify an available expert qualified to answer a particular customer question.

These five advantages represent only the greatest hits of UC technology. Other benefits include increased productivity, reduced travel, and cost savings. The next generation of unified VoIP promises more features and collaboration tools to enhance the way we work and communicate.

How to choose the right platform

There are plenty of unified communications vendors on the market, and sometimes their solutions seem quite similar. When you look through the capabilities, features and capacity associated with them, it can be difficult to tell them apart. After all, the technology manufacturers in this space tend to know what businesses are looking for in a unified communications platform. So, they know what to include. This can make it pretty tough to identify the best one for your business.

Rather than look at the technology side-by-side, it makes more sense to look elsewhere … specifically at yourself.

Start with the requirements your company has for connecting employees and partners in different offices and around the world. Build a requirements list that fully reflects your unified communications needs, and use this as a way to determine not only which manufacturer to use but whether it makes sense to use a purpose-built solution (such as that offered by Shoretel). When you make the decision to implement a particular platform, you’ll know that it is the best available for your company – not the “best” according to some abstract measure.

When you take this approach, make sure you use it from end to end, for both hardware and software. Your unified communications solution should completely address the collaboration needs specific to your organization. If a solution does not provide the functionality that your organization needs out of the box, purpose-built may be a more effective alternative.

Ultimately, your unified communications solution selection should reflect what your company plans to accomplish through employee collaboration and communication. The decision to be discriminating now can lead to greater ROI down the road: making sacrifices doesn’t always pay off! Start with your needs to meet your objectives; don’t limit yourself to off-the-shelf solutions.

To learn more about the history of unified communications, visit Wikipedia.  And when you are ready to choose a platform for your business, contact the teXium team to find the best option available!