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In the past few years, the work environment has changed dramatically. And it continues to evolve. More and more employees are working remotely or traveling around the world to meet with colleagues, customers and partners. Jobs are no longer tied to a specific physical location, and people have come to rely on devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and laptops to stay connected and productive. To keep up with today’s fast-paced business environment, people must be able to access data, applications and colleagues—using the device of their choice—at any time, from any location around the world.
In response to this shift, IT and line-of-business (LOB) managers are challenged to find innovative ways to:
Adapt quickly to changing business conditions.
Simplify and optimize how employees interact with colleagues, customers, business partners and suppliers.
Derive more demonstrable business value from multivendor IT and tele-phony environments.
Simplify infrastructure by converging voice, data and video technologies.
Preserve existing investments and avoid having to rip and replace legacy solutions.
Protect the privacy and security of critical information assets.
What’s more, IT and LOB managers must accomplish these objectives while also reducing costs and boosting productivity.
An environment that helps people respond quickly and helps increase productivity
You need a reliable and flexible communications and collaboration platform—one that delivers the capabilities you need today and that can be extended to meet your business and user requirements for years to come. You want to deliver a consistent and simplified user experience, one that adds value to the business processes and applications your employees rely on. And, ultimately, you want to position your organization to be able to rapidly adopt and adapt to new capabilities as they’re needed without increasing IT complexity or administration and management requirements.
The IBM Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC2™) strategy combines the essential software, services, hardware and business partner relationships you need to connect people to applications, data and one another anytime, anywhere—allowing people to find, reach and collaborate more easily than ever before. IBM’s open and extensible software platform, together with strong partnerships with leading telephony, audio and video vendors, provides a unified, consistent user experience that seamlessly integrates with your multivendor environment. IBM’s open framework also allows you to extend the capabilities of your infrastructure with plug-in applications that can be quickly and easily installed to enhance the functionality of IBM Lotus® Sametime® software. Plus, the strategy enables you to manage your IT and telephony environment in a way that meets your company’s needs and helps reduce overall costs.
IBM Lotus Sametime software: the foundation of the IBM UC2 strategy
At the heart of the IBM UC2 strategy is a powerful platform—IBM Lotus Sametime software. IBM has extended its award-winning instant messaging (IM) and Web conferencing solution to include integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and presence and location awareness. Lotus Sametime software also allows you to connect your Lotus Sametime community with public IM networks.
Using Lotus Sametime software, you can give your employees access to all the communications and collaboration capabilities they need to work effectively with geographically dispersed teams—through a single, easy-to-use interface and rich security features. A simplified user experience can help bolster both individual and team productivity. And because users are dealing with a single, consistent interface for all their communications and collaboration needs, the Lotus Sametime platform can help keep training at a minimum—even when you need to add new functionality. By taking advantage of the extensive IBM Business Partner community, which offers a variety of plug-in applications that easily integrate into the Lotus Sametime platform, you can introduce new capabilities to your environment. Plus, all of these plug-ins are available online in the IBM Lotus Business Solutions Catalog.
Extending the IBM Lotus Sametime platform to optimize communications and collaboration
Suppose you need immediate input from a colleague on an important project, but you’re on the road and your colleague travels between two separate offices. With the Lotus Sametime platform, you can let your colleague know the best way to contact you—and access your colleague’s contact preferences as well. This information is updated dynamically, enabling you to collaborate with your colleague via a number of different channels depending on circumstances—and even move easily between those channels as your needs change.
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