Unified Communications

“Unified Communications (UC) can be thought of as a collection of individual capabilities brought together in a cohesive way to improve business communication, reduce costs and increase productivity.

It does this by not only adding functionality to the office environment (conferencing, collaboration, presence, etc.) but also by extending these capabilities to travelling and home workers, therefore ensuring people are able to work effectively and productively regardless of location and access method.

Communications Australia partners with the leading UC vendors, allowing us to customize a solution to suit any business, regardless of size or existing infrastructure. We work with our customers to identify the requirements, and then plan an implementation to suit their timescales and budget, utilizing a phased approach where necessary.

Lastly, along with the deployment of new technology comes the need to both manage the change to a potentially different way of working and perhaps adapt the existing business processes to take full advantage of the new solution. This is often where UC deployments fail and the full benefits are never realized, but CommsAust can also help with this process through its professional services.

The following lists the major elements of a UC solution, which can be delivered individually or in combination to suit both the needs of the business and the budget.

Voice

Voice remains a key and often business critical component of UC, and regardless of whether your investment is currently in a TDM solution or you are planning to move to IP Telephony as part of a UC deployment, CommsAust can design a solution to suit. We have expertise in traditional telephony systems, as well as newer software-based voice and UC offerings, ensuring we not only advise on the most suitable mix of products from the leading vendors, but can also ensure the right solution is delivered with minimal business risk and cost. Additionally, because of our TDM experience and ongoing management of these systems for a great many of our customers, we can often simply overlay UC onto existing infrastructure, saving unnecessary replacement costs.

Video

Video Conferencing (VC) exists in many forms today. It can be as simple as peer to peer desktop video from one of the free Internet chat clients, right through to dedicated TelePresence systems that connect virtual boardrooms between offices with a mix of technology and environments. A UC solution might combine many of these elements, maybe allowing a Teleworker to use his desktop video client to take part in a video conference between two offices, or a distributed team all using video to hold a virtual meeting including a web collaboration session.

CommsAust can build a video solution tailored to your requirements, using either our dedicated High Definition (HD) video conferencing offering, the video solution embedded in any of our vendor’s UC solutions, or a combination of the two where this best suits the requirements.

Messaging

In the context of UC, Messaging has grown from the traditional Voicemail and Unified Messaging (UM) solutions, typically associated with voice deployments, now includes both email and Instant Messaging and can extend to mobile devices. UM allows voicemail messages to be delivered directly to the email inbox, where they can be promptly actioned, which becomes particularly beneficial with today’s email capable mobile devices. Additional benefits of UM come from both the familiarity and ease of use of an email client compared to a specific voicemail system for advanced features such as distributions lists and broadcast messaging, plus delivers cost savings from not having to call back in to retrieve voicemails, especially when abroad. CommsAust can integrate either UM or the complete UC suite into your existing messaging environment, including mobile access.

Instant Messaging & Presence

Instant Messaging and Presence (IM&P) has arrived in the corporate world from its chat client beginnings on the public Internet. Instant Messaging (IM) adds real-time communication to the desktop to augment the existing email and voice options, and when combined with the presence capabilities, works well to either ask quick questions of available colleagues or as a starting point before maybe elevating the conversation to voice, video or multimedia conference.

Presence also allows you to check the availability of a person before wasting time trying to contact them, and therefore helps to reduce some of the latency in business communications today. CommsAust can offer IM&P solutions from the leading providers, and integrate these into both your groupware and voice systems. In some instances Presence capabilities can also be added to email clients, office applications, intranet pages and bespoke business applications. Additionally, this capability can be federated to other organizations you do business with on a regular basis as a way of further improving communications (A good analogy is to think of how you can now contact a Yahoo Messenger address from a Microsoft MSN address, and vice versa).

Conferencing

Conferencing can be as simple as basic ad-hoc voice conferencing as a feature on the PBX through dedicated systems offering more advanced scheduled services, to combined audio, web and video conferencing supplied either on-premise, hosted or leased. Today, conferencing solutions can integrate with groupware systems for email and calendaring, run on VoIP converged networks to reduce cost, and scale from a few to thousands of users where necessary. Through our vendor network, CommsAust can deliver options in basic audio conferencing through to full multimedia conferencing and collaboration.

Collaboration

Often used in conjunction with or as part of a conferencing solution, collaboration allows workers separated by distance to work on common projects through technologies like document and desktop sharing and electronic white boarding.

Multimedia Contact Centre

Contact Centre solutions share a great deal of functionality with UC, but as they are often deployed as a separate entity, we have a dedicated team that specializes in them. Please visit our main contact centre page here

Mobility

In today’s world, mobile communications are becoming ever more critical, and their integration into office communications systems more commonplace. CommsAust can deliver everything from the simple integration of newer generation mobile phones directly to some IP-PBX’s, right through to UC applications and clients deployed onto Smartphones themselves. Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) is another new technology, which allows the extension of PBX number and features onto the mobile phone, as well as facilitating roaming between office wireless networks and the mobile network as needed. In conjunction with our voice-ready wireless data networking solutions, CommsAust is able to advise and deploy the best product offering from our portfolio to suit your business environment.

Additionally, CommsAust has the ability to further integrate these elements and more through its Professional Services offerings and its Voice Application portfolio, which can include customized applications where necessary. These applications can be anything from simple add-ons, (SMS gateway, IP or mobile phone applications, trunk radio integration into the PBX, etc.), right through to fully customized and communications-enabled workflow.

Regardless of which combination of elements you deploy, UC brings with it some significant business benefits, including but not limited to, the following:

Increased efficiencies resulting in improved productivity.
Faster and more streamlined communication with staff, suppliers and customers.
Removes geographic boundaries from collaborative working.
Facilitates a reduction in travel, leading to costs savings and minimizing employee downtime.
Can reduce fixed, mobile and conferencing telephony costs.
Delivers a competitive edge through a faster response time to customers.
Allows reduction in real estate and energy costs through increased teleworking viability.