Do UC? If not, check your company's vision!
What’s the fuss about unified communications and collaboration (UCC)? Not to be dramatic or anything, but it is probably going to change business communications forever. Does this get your attention? Good, because impressive results are being reported by early adopters like IBM, Cisco and Microsoft. Even small businesses are embracing the concepts of unified communications and collaboration.
For those who have only a vague notion of UCC, consider this a wake-up call. The first important concept behind UCC is integration…of all the disconnected communication tools we use. Industry analysts have mentioned over a dozen elements that may comprise a complete UCC solution: (1) Telephony, (2) Unified Messaging (email, SMS, voicemail, fax), (3) Desktop Client, (4) Instant Messaging (IM), (5) Audio Conferencing, (6) Video Conferencing, (7) Web Conferencing, (8) Converged Conferencing, (9) Notification Service, (10) Personal Assistant, (11) Rich Presence Service, (12) Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), (13) Contact Center, and (14) Mobile Solutions.
As you see, the tools to be integrated include “real-time” services such as instant messaging, telephony and conferencing as well as non-real-time services such as the components of Unified Messaging. Integration is expected to save user time, which improves productivity, and reduce cost for companies that support multiple, disconnected technologies. So far so good. Now things get a bit more technical.
A UCC integration effort also includes “enablers,” like rich presence and requirements, like openness, which assure compatibility among components. These are explained simply and well in this short video.
Practically speaking, how does UCC save time? Well, have you ever wasted time trying to track someone down over phone or email only to have them respond to your message or voicemail too late to help you solve the problem? With presence information (a function of a UCC system that can determine where users are and display their availability status) and one-number portability, a UCC system can automatically and quickly route your message to the individual. So, what if that person isn’t available or is out of office? With CEBP, the system can automatically forward your message to your contact’s back-up or escalation point.
UCC is no small effort so many companies start with a limited number of components for specific business applications. “Try, test and measure” lives on as a worthy approach. UCC can be implemented in phases or elements of UCC can be accessed via a variety of hosted and managed service offerings. The idea is simple - multiple media formats and devices linked together behind an easy-to-use interface.
In upcoming articles, we will talk about some early adopters’ successes and define key UC terms. Seems like UCC is going to make life interesting for some time to come.