Links

IT Planner: 5 Steps to Unified Communications

<<<... "Form factor is superimportant. Have open houses to show the devices, so people can come and play with them physically," said Karlinsky. "Our partners and systems integrators that did that had a much faster ramp-up time in terms of getting end-user adoption." Prior to elementary training and device selection, however, it is incumbent upon UC implementers to understand how the companys users conduct business on a daily basis to fully understand what needs to be unified.

 "Think about what is in the users work spaces," said Ciscos Thompson. "Ask what needs to get the job done that supports the companys competitive advantage and that will tell you what to think about as you go through the process of unification." 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. more >>>