A Brilliantly Simple Way to Evaluate a UC System

Follow these nine simple practical ideas to implement a new business communication system that delights your end-user clients.

Want to dramatically improve the communications effectiveness of your team? Consider a unified communications (UC) system. A UC system gives your employees a communications dashboard from which they can access communications tools, including voice, audio conferencing, unified messaging, Web collaboration, instant messaging (IM), mobile integration, presence, video, and business process integration.

For maximum effectiveness, all of these communication tools are available to workers, regardless of their location. Their office becomes wherever they are — without having to run to a centralized building or other regional site to check in and catch up with the latest round of messages.

While nearly every organization is looking for a jolt of efficiency these days, many fall into the trap of thinking that UC is an overwhelming proposition. The reality is that UC dramatically helps increase the number of communications options for users, but having a UC system that is brilliantly simple to use and manage is the only way to help ensure widespread adoption.

Creating an "office of one" for employees within your organization should be brilliantly simple, so to help you assess what is involved with choosing the right UC system for your organization, we've created the following tip sheet:

  • Collaborate. Bring the entire team that will be involved in deploying your new UC system together as early in the process as possible. The team should include selected IT staff, managers of communication-intensive departments, an executive assistant, and a receptionist or operator. It's also helpful to invite a sales executive who works outside headquarters and the CFO. With a collaborative process, you get stakeholder buy-in upfront and avoid last-minute surprises.
  • Use the system. The best starting place for evaluating a UC system is to actually use the products under consideration. Bring the UC system in-house for a test drive without the distractions of sales pitches. Evaluate and test the products yourself to see if they live up to their marketing materials.
    Narrow your choice to two finalists and conduct side-by-side trials against your current system for at least 30 days. Listen to your team's feedback. Engage your IT team to oversee the installation process, and get their perspective on ease of management. Using the UC system in its real-world context will readily reveal which one will be simple to use and manage.
  • Reliability. Seriously consider the reliability of the UC system. As many vendors raced to convert their phone systems to IP, the reliability of some systems has been compromised. For instance, many vendors use servers as the building block for their communications product, but the more servers, the more points of failure and maintenance requirements. Ask each vendor to give you a graphic of the overall system design as well as a bill of materials. Then count the servers. Also ask for meantime between failure documentation and actual results, but only proceed with those vendors who will provide actual results, not theoretical documentation.
  • Availability. Reliability is the probability of failure and availability is the impact of failure. When your phone system goes down, you lose your connection to your customers and business comes to a screaming halt. Review the UC schematic and understand the impact of the failure of each and every component.
  • Scalability. Look closely to ensure the UC system will scale with the growth of your business. Scalability can be a real land mine. For instance, the product family under purchase consideration may scale to 240 phones, but the model under discussion caps at 84 phones. A great way to gauge scalability is to take the proposed system configuration and ask for a quote to double the capacity. Compare the new quote to the original bill of materials to see what has changed. Remember that the initial cost of a system that can grow to twice its size can save money over the long run.
  • System architecture. Carefully review the system architecture to ensure the UC system will be fully functional and capable over time. A quick way to tell if the phone system is an old TDM system that has been retread for IP is that the vendor will tell you that you can reuse your old phones. Ask your potential vendors if the UC product was built through acquisition, in which the key elements were designed completely independently of one another. Systems that were designed from the beginning with the end in mind can take full advantage of the IP world.
  • Total cost of ownership. TCO can be a real gotcha. Most people focus on the upfront costs, yet the initial capital costs only constitute 20 percent of the overall costs. The other 80 percent are operating costs, which are a fixed, recurring charge once you've locked into a communications platform. To avoid this trap, find out what it will cost to maintain your new system for five years. Ask if the vendor includes software upgrades as part of the maintenance contract. Some do; most do not.
  • Financial strength. Now more than ever, get a clear picture of the financial strength of a potential vendor. Nortel had the largest installed base of enterprise systems in the world; their assets were auctioned off in September. It doesn't matter if you're talking to a larger company or a smaller one; check their balance sheet to make sure they are financially stable.
  • Customer references. Complete your due diligence by checking references. Many people skip this last step. Talk to other customers, but don't just look for satisfied ones — look for the cheerleaders and evangelists for their system and supplier. Ask if they would buy the system again, what their costs are really like, and if the system is easy for their IT department to manage.

If you follow these simple guidelines, focus on implementing best practices and avoid land mines along the way, you'll be well on your way to a successful UC deployment and implementation.

For more information on understanding the business impact of UC systems, see this video of ShoreTel CEO John W. Combs' keynote presentation at this year's TMCnet ITEXPO, or request a demonstration to see for yourself.