- Best Practices
- Gary Audin, Delphi, Inc.
Unified Communications (UC) is really the convergence of six communication products areas. Some of the six areas have existed for years and others are recent entries. UC is really part of the evolution of IT and telecom into one common set of features and functions, not a brand new, just emerging, concept. The six areas are:
There are multiple approaches to UC that should immediately signal the institution that the vendor community has a number of different UC solutions. This makes it difficult to compare products. It also means that the vendors do not compare easily nor do all the solutions have equal capabilities.
When a vendor promotes an institution as a successful implementation of UC, confusion will occur. It will be hard to determine how much UC is actually deployed in this vendor-selected successful implementation. It could be that only Unified Messaging is present and not a full complement of UC functions.
There is no single method for enabling an institution to implement the UC migration. Think of UC as a menu, not a single entity. The institution selects those functions and features it perceives as valuable. Staff/employee productivity increases will occur. Whether or not the productivity increases offset the UC investment will vary by enterprise and departmentally within the enterprise. UC benefits will not be consistent across all the enterprise's business units, CXOs and staff.
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- The evolution of the legacy PBX into the IP Telephony system
- The development of the softphone as part of the IP-based PBX offerings
- Integrating voice mail and e-mail
- Changing the e-mail function to a desktop management tool
- Multiple forms of conferencing such as web, voice and video
- Instant messaging services and capabilities
There are multiple approaches to UC that should immediately signal the institution that the vendor community has a number of different UC solutions. This makes it difficult to compare products. It also means that the vendors do not compare easily nor do all the solutions have equal capabilities.
When a vendor promotes an institution as a successful implementation of UC, confusion will occur. It will be hard to determine how much UC is actually deployed in this vendor-selected successful implementation. It could be that only Unified Messaging is present and not a full complement of UC functions.
There is no single method for enabling an institution to implement the UC migration. Think of UC as a menu, not a single entity. The institution selects those functions and features it perceives as valuable. Staff/employee productivity increases will occur. Whether or not the productivity increases offset the UC investment will vary by enterprise and departmentally within the enterprise. UC benefits will not be consistent across all the enterprise's business units, CXOs and staff.
Download Paper
(Webtorials registration required for downloads. Click here if you forgot your username/password.)
Whenever we have a contribution from Gary Audin, we know that it's going to be top-notch, and this is no exception.
In this guide for migration, Gary does a superb job of defining the benefits of UC, examining a specific timeline for moving from generic IP telephony to full UC, and then offering a set of best practices for how to accomplish this undertaking.
Definitely a "must read" independent paper.