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Wednesday, May 26, 2010

A Day in the Life of an Employee using Unified Communications Tools

A Day in the Life of an Employee using Unified Communications Tools

Employees that work for employers that have IP enabled Telephony applications are a lucky bunch indeed. These employers have realized the immense benefits available by using softphones, collaboration tools and IP centric network connectivity. The employee is now able to enhance their productivity in an anyplace, anytime, anywhere environment. The following example shows how a mobile Softphone, Instant Messaging and collaboration tools allows me to get my work done in an efficient and productive manner.

• 6:00 a.m. Wake up, shower, shave and out the door. I am meeting a client in Ottawa and I need to drop by the office to get a file.
• 7:15 a.m. Park and run upstairs to get the file. A short walk to the Fly Porter Shuttle bus stop. My Blackberry keeps me in touch while on the way to the airport.
• 9:14 a.m. Laptop plugged into guest cubicle and a quick check of emails and voice mails for any urgent items
• 9:30 a.m. Customer meeting to discuss some changes to our auditing engagement.
• 11:00 a.m. Back to my guest cubicle for a conference call
• 11:15 p.m. Frank sees I am connected and through Instant Messaging asks me to join a meeting with a possible new client who wishes to meet at 5:00 pm in Toronto. A quick check of the Porter flight schedule means I can attend. I send an Instant Message to Frank while in the conference call that I will attend.
• I continue my work as if I was in the Toronto office, making and receiving telephone calls with clients
• 3:00 p.m. I leave the Ottawa office for my flight to Toronto
• 4:45 p.m. I connect my laptop at my desk and reply to several important emails
• 5:00 p.m. Meet with Frank and the new client
• 7:00 p.m. We are invited to present our solution to the partners in New York at their office.
• 8:30 p.m. After dinner and helping the kids with homework, I connect to the network to retrieve a presentation template and start work on my presentation. Frank calls me and we discuss the proposal using the whiteboard application. Seeing that Brenda in the Manhattan office is on-line we ask her to participate and add some content.
• 11:00 p.m. Done! Time to get some rest and I feel assured that I can make changes once we arrive at the Manhattan office and can present our solution the following day. I know that I can be accessible and productive on my business trip and still be connected to the Toronto office as if I was there.

Strategic Technology – Unified Communications – The Importance of Presence

Strategic Technology – Unified Communications – The Importance of Presence

Unified Communications increase the speed of interaction between co-workers and customers by bringing together voice, messaging and video. It’s only been the last few years that organizations have started to see the real benefits and the promises it delivers.

Unified communications brings together fixed and mobile telephony, email, fax, instant messaging and conferencing into a single unified workspace.

It’s transparent and integrated and its technology is stable and mature. One problem it doesn’t solve is getting the right message to the right person at the right time so that they can respond immediately. That’s where the key feature of UC, “presence” comes into play.

Presence lets users know who is reachable, where and by what method they can be reached. Users can see who on their buddy list is online, available, busy, in a meeting, or reachable only by cellphone while traveling.

So now we can communicate in an intelligent manner and in the moment.

The biggest benefit of presence is the ability to IM a colleague, and has a quick chat session that can escalate to a telephone call if required. These messages allow teams and groups of people to eliminate telephone tag and voice mail and are able to communicate in real time and in an effective manner.

The collaboration of voice, video and messaging can be managed effectively by the use of the presence feature. The faster organizations can implement these tools the faster they can communicate more effectively and increase the employee productivity.