Unified communications:
As enterprises migrate to VOIP they’re also increasingly adopting a number of other IP-based, real-time applications including instant messaging, audio, Web and video (both room-based and desktop) conferencing, and real-time communications dashboards. In interviewing about 100 enterprises for our “Building a Successful Virtual Workplace” benchmark, Nemertes confirmed that for most of these applications, adoption rates exceed 50%. (Please see Figure 1: Real-Time Application Usage).
As the number of communications applications has increased, so has the complexity for the end user. An individual must go through a series of steps to determine the best communications application or service to use depending on a given situation, location or time of day. Attempts to reach colleagues often result in numerous voice messages or chat requests across multiple services and devices, including desktop and mobile phones. For example, suppose “John” wants to call “Joe.” John may first try to send an instant message to Joe. After not getting a response, he calls Joe’s desk phone and leaves a voice message. He then calls Joe’s mobile phone. Again not getting an answer, he leaves a message. Finally, John sends Joe an e-mail or SMS message with the hope that Joe will read it on his mobile device.
The end result of this example is that John went through a series of steps, but was never able to reach Joe. Joe has messages in multiple places that he must retrieve and delete. The growing variety of applications made communications more, not less, complex, leading to increased frustration and reduced efficiency.
In addition to the growing number of communications applications, one must also factor in the changing nature of the knowledge worker. Individuals increasingly work from multiple locations, including home offices, hotels, conference centers, partner locations and airports. Mobile devices are often limited in the applications that they support, yet remote workers still need access to communications services.
What is needed is a way of integrating various forms of real-time communications and collaboration applications so individuals can manage all their communications in an integrated fashion, in both desktop and mobile environments. This will offer individuals the ability to not only control how they contact others, but how others can contact them.
Enter Unified Communications
“Unified communications” defines the establishment of an integrated set of user interfaces for all communications services. It further defines the integration of both realtime and non-real-time communications services to bring context and presence to the communications environment. Inherent in the unified-communications architecture is the Real-Time Communications Dashboard, or RTCD. RTCDs may consist of both desktop and mobile software clients, though often with differing levels of functionality. RTCD functionality may further be interwoven into office and business applications, enabling such features as click-to-call and presence status displays from within a variety of applications.
Unifying communications services and applications sets the stage for an organization to implement communications-enabled business processes, whereby business events and business process applications can directly create communications sessions or distribute information via voice, text and even video services. Enterprise applications such as those used for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and specific business processes establish direct connectivity into the unified communications architecture. This approach positions enterprise communications applications as a Web service, using such protocols as XML-based languages such Web Service Description Language (WSDL) and Simple Objects Access Protocol (SOAP) to exchange information between communications platforms and enterprise applications.
It is important to differentiate unified communications from unified messaging, which is simply the integration of voicemail, e-mail and often fax. In most unified messaging solutions, users can listen to e-mails from their phone, listen to voicemails or read faxes via attachments to e-mail messages. UM is often incorporated as a part of unified communications, but does not in and of itself represent a unified communications solution.
Both RTCDs and communications enabled business processes are further defined and explored in the following sections.
The Real-Time Communications Dashboard
Central to the goal of unifying enterprise communications applications and services is the RTCD. The dashboard provides a single user interface enabling individuals to access a myriad of communications via a common front-end. RTCDs may be stand-alone clients, or RTCD features can be integrated into office applications such as Microsoft Office or Lotus Notes.
