Moving to UC: Is Your Phone System Architected to Make It Easy?

True Unified Communications (UC) is about helping people communicate more effectively while simultaneously preventing system administrators from having to maintain multiple platforms.

At the heart of UC is the notion of communicating however you need to, with whatever device you have available to you at the moment, be it PC, mobile phone, BlackBerry or something else. Yet in today’s world, users often carry an arsenal of devices with which to engage in various types of communication, and IT administrators are charged with managing multiple types of devices and platforms. We still have a ways to go before a truly UC-enabled world is realized, but more organizations than ever before are making the transition to UC.

As they do so, the basic architecture of companies’ telephone system—plus the enhancements they make to fine-tune it to support a UC solution—comes into sharp relief. Moving to UC is akin to buying a new car: Sure, that GPS system and the support for satellite radio make a certain vehicle more appealing, but its gas mileage and how comfortably you sit in its driver’s seat also matter a great deal. In short, don’t overlook the core features of the phone system in use at your organization. They can help make your transition to UC run more smoothly.

Some considerations to make sure your phone system is best poised to move to a UC solution: use plain old telephone service (POTS) lines, ensure adequate ventilation and power supply for UC, calculate correctly the amount of bandwidth required to support Quality of Service (critical where voice calls are concerned), and retain some analog lines so you can still access local 911 in the event of an emergency.

Watch Out for Resource Drain
Legacy phone systems have their limitations. Remember, most have never before served as application-development platforms. To address this issue, some IP telephony vendors simply shift the entire phone system to open application servers, but the end result is typically a cumbersome server farm that soaks up more than its share of IT resources and may not offer the reliability essential to supporting voice calls. This is a challenging proposition to make when the goal is to make communications management easier.

What’s more, given the method by which some IP telephony vendors came by their technology—often via the acquisition of other companies’ products—their solutions may not work as seamlessly as their literature may insist. The more discrete pieces that are cobbled together, the more moving parts that are liable to go awry, again consuming substantial IT expertise, dollars and products to manage and maintain.

ShoreTel® believes that the ideal architecture for supporting UC is one that views voice and data in an integrated way, rather than in silos. The ideal UC architecture will offer scalable, reliable service among half a dozen or hundreds of separate sites, which makes service in office locations, whether around the county or around the globe, utterly transparent. And, the ideal UC architecture will be open enough that customers may add on the components they choose from vendors whose products are designed to interface correctly.

Greater Mobility is Possible with UC
True UC encompasses all manner of mobile devices, which are more prevalent than ever and must be considered as crucial elements of a UC solution. While some current mobile devices are limited in their usability—small displays that make using the Web or other visual data tricky, tiny keyboards that demand a surgeon’s dexterity—others, such as IP smartphones, work very well, especially in conjunction with 3G wireless networks. (Among other things, 3G networking allows users to transmit voice and data simultaneously, the better to augment a phone conversation with charts or other data to help illuminate the discussion—a nifty example illustrating the promise of UC. Expect video calls, integration with WiFi and other benefits as 3G and its successors mature and come to market.)

In addition, true UC also supports presence, the concept of being able to detect the IM or telephone or other location and/or availability of the party being called. An architecture that fully supports UC is only possible when presence is enabled. Among other presence features, ShoreTel delivers just-in-time presence, in which the caller begins typing into a phone directory the name of the person she wishes to contact; the target’s contact information, as well as their current presence, automatically appears.

To fully exploit the promise of UC, organizations need to consider a UC solution that is architected to be UC-friendly from the ground up. Just as ShoreTel’s UC offering is renowned for its ease-of-use, its UC features and functions are enjoying the same level of positive customer feedback and industry acclaim. In addition, the ShoreTel solution has been built with an eye toward integration with third parties’ UC offerings, since the spectrum of offerings under the UC umbrella is so broad that no one vendor can deliver it all.

For more information about ShoreTel’s Pure IP Unified Communications solutions, please visit www.shoretel.com/products.