There are four key components to UC:
• Instant messaging and Presence
• Web, audio, and video conferencing
• Enterprise telephony (traditional PBX functionality)
• Unified Messaging
This section gives a brief
description of each of the key UC components and explains why moving to
a UC solution can be beneficial for organizations.
1. Instant Messaging and Presence
Instant messaging (IM) is the capability to
communicate instantaneously between two or more people with text-based
messages. Presence conveys the ability and willingness of a user to
communicate. These two capabilities combine to be the most commonly
used UC component in nearly every organization. Understanding how
Enterprise IM and Presence evolved will help you understand why it is
the core of any UC solution.
IM and Presence has been around since the
1990s. You might remember ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). A lot of
companies followed suit, and soon there was an explosion of consumer IM
providers, all with different protocols and clients. Consumers started
to use these consumer IM services for business communications, which
was very risky for organizations. Business users were now using
third-party tools that often were not secured in any form. Usage could
not be tracked or controlled, and these tools were being used for
day-to-day business on company PCs. When users were communicating
through public networks, the exposure to malware increased, as well as
the possibility of valuable company information leaving company PCs.
Because of those risks, there was a need to develop an enterprise-grade
solution that would allow business users to securely communicate the
way they were used to communicating outside of work.
In 1998, IBM launched Lotus
Sametime, the first enterprise instant messaging product. Shortly after
that, Microsoft released Exchange Instant Messaging, which would later
evolve into Live Communications Server, and would finally become what
we know as Microsoft Lync. IM has evolved into a business-critical
communications tool for most organizations. In fact, many organizations
consider IM more critical than email, and some even more critical than
dial tone.
2. Benefits of Instant Messaging and Presence
IM and Presence is the core of all UC
solutions. These two features are often packaged together, and
sometimes are simply referenced as only “instant messaging.” IM is a
feature most organizations will deploy on day one of a UC deployment.
Presence is one of the major drivers for UC, because it is at the core
of providing an increase in productivity to end users. Presence
introduces the real-time availability of users, which allows
organizations to see greatly increased productivity through more
efficient communications. This benefit is best described in the
scenario that follows.
Assume that Randy and Alex both work for
CompanyABC. The company does not have a UC solution deployed today.
Randy works in the Manhattan office and Alex works in the San Francisco
office. If Randy wants to get in touch with Alex, he has two options:
send Alex an email or call him on the telephone. The problem starts
here: Randy does not know when Alex will respond
to that email or whether Alex will be around to answer the phone when
he calls. Most likely, time will be wasted with missed calls and emails
while Randy is attempting to reach Alex. This type of inefficient
communication impacts their overall business productivity.
Now, introduce a UC solution that leverages
IM and Presence into this scenario. When Randy wants to communicate
with Alex, he simply needs to look at his Presence indicator. If Alex
shows as available, Randy can send an IM to Alex and ask whether he is
available to talk. In some cases, an IM might be all that is needed to
cover what Randy originally needed to talk to Alex about. If they need
to communicate through voice, this is often a quick escalation in the
same UI. If Alex is showing as not available, Randy will know what the
most efficient way to communicate with him is. Randy could tag Alex’s
contact for status alerts, which would alert Randy when Alex becomes
available. Randy could also communicate either through an email, or a
phone call to voice mail, or Randy could simply wait until Alex is
available to start an IM conversation.
The scenario just described clearly
outlines why IM and Presence is a critical component for UC, and a
major driver for organizations to introduce a UC solution to their
environment.
3. Web, Audio, and Video Conferencing
Conferencing is not new to most
organizations; however, a unified conferencing experience is new. Many
organizations have web, audio, and video conferencing through three
separate third-party providers. For web and audio conferencing,
organizations are typically charged a monthly fee per user in addition
to a per-minute fee for using these services. For video conferencing,
some organizations have large deployments of video conferencing
equipment on their network, whereas others might be using a third-party
hosted solution.
The services available in each of these areas
can vary greatly. Some audio conferencing solutions are simply PSTN
dial-in bridges, in which all users in a conference will dial a PSTN
phone number and be placed into a conference hosted by the provider.
Some web conferencing solutions will provide a web browser application
for conferencing functionality, whereas others require a desktop
application to be installed. Which service options are available to
organizations is not entirely important for this section; however, it
is important that these services are usually not interoperable with
each other. This leads to a disjoined conferencing experience, and
organizations are not able to realize the true benefits of conferencing.
