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.