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5 Steps to Unified Communications
<<<... Thompson sees four primary areas to take into consideration: devices (PCs, phones, mobile devices and accessories), applications (messaging, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, collaboration tools), network types (office, home, mobile, wired or wireless) and operating systems.
Conducting this kind of inventory will help implementers ensure that pockets of users are not left out in the cold as the project comes into place. If the graphics team is running on Macs and the engineering team is running on Linux, implementers need to ensure that the new communications tools will work on those platforms and will be supported in the applications that would benefit from a collaborative environment.
Step 3: Deploy in Parallel
A UC deployment project will require much heavy lifting. Given the sheer magnitude of the project, maintaining parallel deployment threads will be essential, as upgrades of the majority of the network can be done concurrently with the early pilots of the communication and collaboration tools.
Companies that are embarking on their first VOIP deployment will have an especially large amount of work to do on the network to ensure QOS (quality of service). Since large enterprises are commonly composed of many globally distributed branch offices—often melded together through mergers and acquisitions—organizations need to extend that kind of network resiliency to the WAN as much as possible.
"One of the first things we did within Accenture when we approached our internal unified communications program was to start with a network transformation program," said Accentures Redey. "On the wide-area networks, we moved to MPLS [Multiprotocol Label Switching] to take advantage of its quality-of-service features, and we also upgraded our local-area networks so they also have quality of service built in. With this foundation in place, we could then layer collaboration tools on top." more>>>