The biggest problem with Unified Communications (UC) is that people are really underestimating the complexity, pitfalls, sophistication, costs, and resources needed to implement UC into their business. In addition, many organizations miss out on the opportunities UC presents; such as improved business processes, tightened communications between staff and their clients, as well as superior infrastructure stability.
Greg Johnson (Director of Media Services & Telecommunications at Humber College), a client of ours, refers to UC as an octopus with many arms. “Just as you think you have all parts of the project tackled and understood, you discover other arms/tentacles of the project, further increasing its complexity.” UC projects are notorious for their complexity, but don’t let that shy you away from migrating to UC.
Mistakes are made when IT views this as a simple PBX replacement; rather UC is a combination of products and services that are ever changing and evolving. Therefore your plan must be flexible, dynamic and should mirror your business goals.
Quite often we see companies that settle with a project that never quite finishes completion due to the frustration and challenges that were encountered. It is underscored by shortcomings in the initial project, by not having a well-defined strategic plan.
Every day, we work with clients to ensure that their UC project runs smoothly and that they get the most value out of their project and opportunities are not missed.
I designed this 8 week blog series to give a chance to reflect and change direction if required prior to migrating your systems to an IP-PBX with UC. I hope this series can help prevent others from making costly mistakes that we so often see other companies make in the field.
Well, let’s dive right in!
Consideration #1: You know you are behind when you think Unified Messaging (UM) is Unified Communications!
Recently at the IAUG (International Avaya User Group) conference one of the executive speakers referred to UM as a legacy technology! WOW! Often in our early stages of discovery customers frequently inquire about UM as part of the UC deployment. Would you be surprised to learn that UM is not even considered a UC feature? Actually, UM techniques have been available to us for over a decade in the TDM world. One of our high value process improvements for any organization is the immediate adoption of a non-UC feature to pave the way to real UC features.
So what is the difference between Unified Communications and Unified Messaging?
Unified Communications is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, telephony (including IP telephony), video conferencing, data sharing (including web connected electronic whiteboards aka IWB’s or Interactive White Boards), call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as UM (integrated voicemail, e-mail), SMS and fax. UC is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types. There have been attempts at creating a single product solution however the most popular solution is dependent on multiple products.
Unified Messaging is the integration of voicemail into your e-mail mailbox. Therefore, we are integrating 2 non-real time technologies together into one user experience. It lacks the real-time component that would qualify it as a UC application. It’s a great feature, it’s just not UC!
Stay tuned for my next blog post on UC Considerations: Are you stuck in your traditional ways? and The cost of being “ubiquitous.”
Emily Nielsen,
UC Specialist & President of Nielsen IT Consulting Inc.
UC Strategic Planning Blog Series – Table of Contents
Having a plan is the first step to leadership. Follow our blog over the next eight weeks to learn key actionable items that are crucial to developing an effective UC Strategy for your company.
- Part 1a: UC Considerations
- Part 1b: UC Considerations Continued
- Part 2: The Importance of a Unified Communications Strategic Plan
- Part 3: The Discovery Process
- Part 4: Defining Your Vision
- Part 5: Identifying Corporate Requirements
- Part 6: Identifying UC Applications
- Part 7: Infrastructure Assessment
- Part 8: Final Thoughts
Am looking forward to the rest of the series and good distinction between UM and UC, although I would submit that UM is a sub-component of UC, and one that is finally gaining traction after nearly 25 years. The first UM offering I saw was ATT’s (now Avaya), circa 1990.
Unified Messaging (voice and fax messages appearing in your email inbox) as a feature has indeed been around for a very long time. So long in fact that I wouldn’t really characterize it as a function of Unified Communications since as stated in the original blog it is not ‘real time’ communications. I think the interesting point here is that so many customers never really understood all the capabilities/features that their legacy PBX could deliver.
As a comment to both Mike and Bryon’s statements; in our practice we spend a great deal of time discussing with our clients telephony features that have been available for years as part of our UC assessment. It’s amazing just how many organizations already have a number of features already present on their current system(s) that could help streamline their processes that they are not aware of. Unified Messaging (UM) is definitely one that simply makes sense!
Mistakes are made when IT views this as a simple PBX replacement; rather UC is a combination of products and services that are ever changing and evolving. Therefore your plan must be flexible, dynamic and should mirror your business goals.