An emerging suite of integrated technologies, called unified communications (UC), offers the promise of converging voice, data, and video communication and of eliminating many roadblocks in communication, thereby enabling organisations to significantly increase their information workers’ productivity.
UC integrates collaboration technology, such as calendaring, email, web conferencing, team rooms, and instant messaging, with communication tools, which include telephones (landline and mobile), audio and video, and voice messaging.
Workdays for many people are no longer 9 to 5. Nowadays, working hours are more like 24 x 7 and spans geographic boundaries, making communication and decision-making even more difficult and more time-sensitive.
Presence information lets people know whether others are available (e.g., online, away, busy, in a meeting, out to lunch), they can publish their availability so others know how best to reach them. The system provides some automation; for example, if a user has not touched the keyboard or mouse for a set number of minutes, that user’s presence information turns to "away."
Using Office Communications Server's integration with Microsoft Exchange calendaring and the PBX or IP telephone system, additional state information is also automatically published. This rich presence enables even more effective communication between colleagues. If a recipient is available online, the sender can click on the recipient’s presence icon and send an instant message (IM). With IP telephony-enabled, one can also click and call another from the desktop. If the person is traveling, it is easy to click to find the mobile number and make contact that way, or indeed instant messaging on the person’s mobile phone. If the recipient is not available online, one knows to send an email or leave a voice message, which can be received as a WAV file embedded in an email and managed in Outlook.
All of this saves time. With presence information, a sender does not have to try several different types of communication before reaching a colleague. The receiver does not have to sift through repeated communication in email, IM, and voice messages. In a Forrester survey, 59 % of workers stated they would save more than 15 minutes per day with this feature.
Instant messaging is the capability to send and receive text messages in real time over the Internet or a corporate network. The recipient typically sees an alert on the desktop indicating an incoming message and from whom. Enterprise IM maintains this capability within and increasingly beyond the corporate network, adding security that does not exist with public IM systems like AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and Google Talk.
IM replaces email chains, it can include just those who are party to the conversation while those who do not need to participate in next steps are omitted. Depending on the context and need, parties to an IM conversation can complete their communication with IM, escalate the conversation to a phone call, or launch a collaborative session with Live Meeting.
Office Communications Server 2007 makes it possible for organisations to allow users to connect with IM "buddies" in other organisations – when both organisations are using OCS – and public networks in an arrangement called federation.
Furthermore, more than 60% of workers surveyed for a Forrester report indicated that they could save from 1 to 5 hours per week using real-time conferencing. Ad hoc web and video conferencing improves efficiency in real-time decision-making by providing easy setup, links to presence management, and point-and-click conference launches. Value increases when the time to set up a video conference drops to near zero.
Video conferences are increasingly replacing business travel for internal meetings and client or supplier meetings. More companies are using live meeting to hold ad hoc work group sessions with colleagues in different regions, countries, and time zones. They also use Live Meeting to extend their organisation’s services to customers, partners and suppliers. The cost of video hardware has dropped to a point where PC-to-PC video is being increasingly deployed for valuable, albeit seldom, mission-critical situations.
For more complex and critical contexts, more organisations are piloting the use of Microsoft RoundTable, an audio-video unit with a 360° camera. RoundTable enables multi-location conferences with panoramic views of everyone in each conference room and close-up views of individual participants as they take turns speaking.
Forrester discovered that in pilot trials, an important finding was the productivity improvement that occurred when workers could view one another during routine communications. With video enabled between two people discussing an expense report, for example, conversations took slightly longer to complete, but when using video, the issue is usually resolved in a single instance rather than in a series of email messages back and forth between the two parties.
Software-powered VoIP makes it possible to communicate via telephone over an IP network instead of over traditional PBX telephony infrastructure. Voice communications can be integrated with email, calendaring, voicemail/unified messaging, IM, and conferencing to provide a streamlined experience rather than the disconnected experience provided by legacy systems today.
We are approaching a time where all you need to find someone is his name, and all the means of contact are available immediately. Several organisations are looking to a single identity for each employee that aggregates all the contact information (even an individual’s areas of expertise) stored in Active Directory along with some of the ways that staff in the organisation communicate (phone, mobile device, conferencing, IM, email, calendaring).
For many organisations, mobility is an important part of their UC solutions, while for others it is an adjunct set of capabilities for select users. Certain mobile devices can run the OCS client, thus integrating the mobile phone with the individual's presence, IM, and email. With a Windows mobile device, users can open and modify email attachments, attachments within IM and Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents.
Finding the right person becomes faster, and determining his availability and communicating via his preferred, context-dependent medium is smoothed because presence is integrated into Microsoft Office applications. Also, organisations are integrating presence into their own line of business applications more frequently; users can "click to communicate" from within the applications.
Contact Garry Ackerman, Galdon Data, Tel 011 805-4420, garrya@galdon.co.za
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Business communications are becoming increasingly complex and require workers to manage multiple devices, applications, and face-to-face interactions in an attempt to stay productively connected with one another.