Member Article

Unified Communications: making the world a smaller place

It’s a fact – the world is a big place. While it’s an exciting place to explore, the sheer size of the world we live in can, at times, pose a challenge to businesses and organisations. With offices spread over the country, suppliers abroad and customers on different continents, the distance between different touch points with a business or organisation can seem like an unfillable void.

Unified Communications (or UC as it is known), helps to bridge this gap. UC is the integration of real-time communication services such as email, instant messaging and social media, along with voice communication methods such as telephony, mobility and conference calling, all wrapped up and built around document and information sharing systems.

UC is not necessarily a single product. Rather, it’s a set of different systems working seamlessly together to provide a consistent unified user-interface and user-experience across many different devices. It could be a laptop, smartphone or tablet – the essence of UC is that the experience and ability to access shared data is the same regardless of where from or how you are accessing the information.

Through UC systems, an individual can send a message in one medium, and access the same message in another medium. For example, you might receive a voicemail message and then access it through your email as a written note.

In addition, UC allows users to sign into the same system, letting people know where in the world they are, their availability, and whether they are free to communicate in real-time. For example, if the recipient of the voicemail is online and is currently accepting calls, they can respond immediately with a text chat or video call. Alternatively, if the recipient is unavailable, they can respond with a non-real time message that can then be accessed through a whole host of different mediums.

UC really does make the world a much smaller place, minimising the air miles and negating time zone differences. Whether at home or abroad, UC allows colleagues and co-workers to collaborate, working more effectively and efficiently as if based in the same office when in reality, they could be at opposite ends of the Earth.

Of course, this brings massive business benefits too. There’s no more downtime spent on long flights to other countries for business meetings and subsequently lost hours of productivity. Thanks to UC systems, a conference call and shared workflow document can be accessed in real-time regardless of geographical location, meaning what would have once been a day or two out of the office just a few years ago, is now dealt with in just a matter of hours from the comfort of the Board room.

Our day-to-day use of communication systems is all about keeping in touch with people, collaborating on work and doing basic administrative tasks. Our reliance on our email, telephony and other systems is huge; making sure these work optimally and are always available is an important job for any IT team.

At Perfect Image, as well as rolling out a UC system across your workforce, we can also extend these solutions to your customers, suppliers and other stakeholder so you that can enjoy the business benefits of collaborative communication systems, making the world a much smaller and accessible place.

For more information, visit: http://www.perfect-image.co.uk/

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Perfect Image .