This brings benefits to both personal and team communications and co-operation, facilitating virtual team creation and information sharing, and speeding up the pace at which an organisation manages short-term or cross department projects.

Business impact and benefits:

• the ability to develop and align a communications strategy to business objectives

• improved contactability and message management

• a reduction in unnecessary or duplicated communications and operational costs

• lower risks when investing in and deploying communications technologies

• better use of internal resources through a focus on strategic business objectives

• clearer, more effective support and service processes due to the use of one supplier

• increased costs – remote and mobile employees can drive up communication costs, while also delaying critical business processes when out of contact. Employees also frequently use the easiest communication device, rather than the most cost effective or manageable one.

• reduced productivity – multiple, disparate voice and mailboxes increase the amount of time employees spend managing their messages. The likelihood of lost or duplicated interactions is also greater.

• inefficient use of technologies – costs are compounded if the multiple disparat
messaging systems used, offer little or no consistency. Different interfaces limit the likelihood of employees developing sufficient expertise to use different systems to their full functionality.

• insufficient expertise – existing messaging platforms, on legacy hardware, can become costly to maintain or expand as expertise becomes harder to source.

• network support issues – managing multiple platform suppliers and different service contracts creates additional overheads for the support team and can frequently impact fault resolution times.

• no links between the business and its ICT infrastructure – aligning an organisation’s communications technology plans to its business objectives is challenging, particularly if suppliers lack a clear roadmap of their own.

However, investment in new communications technology can prove difficult to justify if the financial business benefits remain unclear or unproven.

The unified solution

If you are someone who has cursory information in communication and how information gets from one place to another, you may have heard of unified communications, but if you are someone who works in an information field where data needs to be transferred fast and efficiently, it should be an important consideration for your business! When you are looking at unified communication, you will find that it will tend to be defined as the movement in businesses large and small towards simplifying and integrating every form of communication that they use. In function, unified communication is a combination of a communication system and an infrastructure improvement, and its goal tends to be a situation where a person can get a message on one type of medium and then get it on another.

When looking at unified communication and trying to understand it, consider the advantage of a system where everyone had the maximum amount of availability. If you needed to talk to a co-worker, for example, you could email them a message and they could get it media as different as their phone, their email, their fax machine or their Blackberry. A good unified communication system is one that takes a large number of media into account, and it can have the very important result of bringing the people in your company even closer together.

There are many different reasons why you may wish to look into unified communication, and perhaps the most important one is latency. The larger a company is, the greater the chance that it will be defeated by size and communication difficulties. The larger a project is, the larger the numbers of people who are going to be involved in it, and all of those people have to be acting together. For example, think about trying to get an aspect of a project approved. You will write an email, but what if some of the people are not at their computers that day? While it is unreasonable to expect detailed work from people who are out and about on other business, sometimes you only need a yes or a no, or an acknowledgment.

A unified communication system will ensure that everyone who is involved in a project can be on the same page and that they will be on it faster than they could. The gains in efficiency that this could make are immense. The exploration of a unified communications system means that there will simply be fewer delays that will happen along an entire chain of events. If something is late, it will not be made later by a delayed message!

At the heart of the idea of unified communications is the concept of improved communications and a better effectiveness quotient when large groups of people need to deal with each other. For a workforce that is already significantly more mobile than it was ten or even five years ago, and with every sign that it will only grow more so, unified communications are something that every business should consider.

Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who writes for a number of UK businesses. For information on Network Hardware, he recommends Network 24, a leading UK Unified Communications provider.

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Why Should Your Company Use Unified Messaging?

Unified messaging is rapidly growing in popularity among businesses and private individuals alike, and for good reason: by using a unified messaging system, it’s possible to receive a number of different types of messages through a single access point instead of needing a different type of access for each message. This can be especially advantageous for businesses, as it allows them to reduce the amount of equipment that they need while making their communications systems much more efficient. If you have been considering switching your company to unified messaging but are wanting to make sure that it’s right for your business needs, then consider the following in order to see whether this is the messaging solution that you’ve been looking for.

An All-in-One Solution

By choosing unified messaging for your company, you will be getting an all-in-one solution for all of your messaging needs. Unified messaging allows your employees to receive voice messages, faxes, e-mail, text messages, and even video messages all through their computer, cellular phone, or other access points. E-mail, faxes, and other text messages can even be received as audio through standard telephones, with text-to-phone technology that is available with many unified messaging services; even if the service that you choose does not offer this feature, your employees will still be able to receive alerts telling them what types of messages they have when using a phone, and will be able to access all of their messages via their cellular phone or over the internet.

Less Equipment to Maintain

Because unified messaging doesn’t require separate machines for each type of message your employees might receive, there is much less equipment which must be bought and maintained. Additionally, the unified messaging system won’t require paper, ink, or other resources the way that fax machines and some other messaging systems might; any faxes or text-based messages can be read and printed out as needed from an employee’s computer, or simply listened to via telephone with a text-to-voice enabled unified messaging system.

Productivity and Cost Effectiveness

There are other advantages to using a unified messaging system, as well. Employees can spend more time focusing on their work instead of having to wait by the fax machine or visit another part of the office every time they need to send certain items off. Though the time spent doing these sorts of tasks may seem trivial, over the course of the day this can add up into a significant amount of time. This can give your employees a little extra time to get their work done, and they will be instantly alerted when the fax or message that they were waiting for arrives.

If your employees travel a lot or are often out of the office, unified messaging can be even more useful. Many unified messaging systems have features which enable messages to be sent to a variety of different access points, trying each in order so that your employee can receive their message alert regardless of whether they’re in the office or away on a job. This can save valuable time as well as trips back and forth from the job site and office to check messages or receive faxes that may be vital to the work that they are doing.

Ricardo Trinidad, President of Telcom & Data, is a telecommunications professional. Established in 1997, he has molded his company into a top-notch telecommunications provider. Telcom-Data offers telecommunications solutions to those business professionals in search of quality products and superior services. To view his whole line of products you can visit http://www.polycom-products.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ricardo_Trinidad

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