Simplifying Life and Cutting Costs – All at the Same Time. What’s Not to Like?
Author: Kevin Schwartz, EVP of Aspect Global Professional ServicesHow many times have you been working on a presentation or other project – on a tight deadline – when you realize there is information you need from another person or department? Of course, because you want the information quickly, it’s always seemingly impossible to find the right person to help when you need it most. Efforts to track someone down via telephone result in your getting stuck in voicemail jail or playing a never-ending game of phone or email tag. And, attempts to “ping” people via instant messenger (IM) somehow end up in one-way conversations between you and cyber space.
If you know what I’m talking about, it’s clearly time for your company to set sail for the second stop on the UC journey. Workgroup Productivity, also known as Collaborative UC, builds on Individual Productivity, which you’ll remember I discussed in my last blog write-up, to deliver improvements across an entire workgroup. It uses the same tools as in the Individual Productivity stage, but also incorporates others, such as audio and video conferencing, and even SharePoint, to support collaboration and team activity, and improve productivity.
How would Workgroup Productivity help you more efficiently and expeditiously complete the above-mentioned project? Instead of spending your time trying to locate people to help, you could use Microsoft Office Communicator by itself or couple it with Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) to check presence status, determine who is available, and begin an IM discussion. If you needed additional information, you could seamlessly share your presentation material and escalate your online communication into a voice or even a video conference.
In addition to making life easier for you and your colleagues, Workgroup Productivity could result in significant measurable reductions in travel and training costs, real estate and facility costs, and telephony and audio conferencing charges. Beware, however, that if you want to achieve certain business outcomes and optimize productivity, you’ll have to plan appropriately and provide employees with training on how to use and manage their presence status so they can control and optimize how, when, and where they are contacted, and also enable appropriate logging and reporting capabilities. Taking these actions will help you meet your security and compliance requirements, and eliminate excessive and unnecessary “pings” to available resources.
Collaborative UC lays the groundwork for your next destination – Enterprise UC. Are you ready to learn about how UC can streamline your business processes?
Author: Aspect
Catergories: Unified Solutions, Unified Communications
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