What is Unified Communications?

Now there is a certain hype around the term Unified Communications. Vendors vied with each other to offer "solutions" and lure users to seminars, at the exit of which everyone put their old PBXs and telephones in a heap, doused with gasoline and set on fire. In this case, all talk about the benefits in general, but no one understands the functionality "by the bone." I tried to figure out what is meant by this term, based on my knowledge. In the comments, you can add what I missed.

And so, Unified Communications - Unified Communications. Functionally, this term implies the unification of all possible means of communication of a company into a single, easily manageable, expandable and accessible system from anywhere in the world. From a business point of view, such an association simplifies and “enriches” the communication between employees among themselves, the company with the outside world, and also leads to a reduction in communication costs. From a technical point of view, Unified communication implies IP communication.

From the plane of beautiful words, let's move on to practice. Consider all possible modern means of communication:

Telephone communication with the outside world on city lines

Telephone communication is divided in turn into outgoing and incoming. Consider the example of a network of offices selling something, vouchers for example (I used to cite as an example where I go to, but they died and I don’t want to jinx anyone else).
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Incoming city communications, regular communications:

• Each office has its own phone number
• Each office has its own physical telephone line.
• Each office has its own mini PBX.

Incoming city communications, unified communications:

• All offices under one single incoming phone
• Offices do not have to have their number and their phone line.
• Offices do not need to have their own PBX

What's new in Unified communications approach? The first point - single incoming has been implemented for a long time, with the help of Call centers on a beautiful number, from which clients' calls are being transferred to the necessary branch. Points two and three are not realizable by means of ordinary city telephony, but are easily realized in IP telephony, when calls are transferred from the central office PBX via Internet channels to the right subscribers. That is, there is no access to the city network.

Outgoing urban communication ordinary communications:

• Each office has its own number and line.
• Each office calls at the rates of the operator who provided the phone number

Outgoing city communications United communications:

• Offices do not need to have their own number and line
• All offices call at uniform rates.

Both points are implemented with the help of IP telephony, when a subscriber from any office sends voice through its Internet channels to its central office PBX, and then the PBX forwards the call to the city network.

Intercom

The employees of our network of offices are distributed in the city (or cities, countries), but still, they really want to communicate with each other.

ordinary communications:

• Internal communication in one office by extension number using a PBX
• Communication between employees of different offices through the urban telephone network
• Extension numbers in different offices overlap.

unified communications:

• Internal communication with all employees through a pass-through identifier for the entire branch network.
• City lines in offices are optional

That is, if earlier we called the city number of this office to call the neighboring office, and then the additional employee, now it’s just an additional employee, unique and not repeated in the entire network of the company. Communication takes place over IP.

Employee availability

Conventional communications:

• Short number dialing, if the employee is in the same office
• Dialing a city and dialing a short number in another office
• Call to a cell employee

unified communications:

• Automatic search and connection to all available contacts (softphone on a computer, urban, cellular) when dialing an employee's internal number.
• If the employee is not available anywhere, transfer the call to Voice Mail.

That is, you do not need to know where the employee is at the moment. The system itself will find it in addition, and if it does not (never picked up the phone), it will transfer the call to VoiceMail.

Integration of voice services with e-mail and CRM.

ordinary communications:

• no or difficult.

unified communications:

• Voice messages come to email
• Fax comes to email, fax can be sent with email
• The caller's number is compared by the CRM database, and the manager displays the customer information.

In this section, everything is more or less clear. Some telephony features are integrated for the convenience of employees with the company's email and CRM system.

Remote work

ordinary communications:

• Communication through a corporate or personal cellular employee

unified communications:

• The opportunity to work from anywhere, where there is Internet (full-fledged workplace).
• Automatic forwarding incoming to cellular.
• The possibility of communication with any employee through the internal number is preserved.
• Access to voice mail through company IVR (call to a city-based company).

Unified communications provides very wide possibilities for remote work with corporate communications. This is one of the main advantages over conventional telephony.

Additional and multimedia communication capabilities

ordinary communications:

• Conferences
• chat company

unified communications:

• Internal chat company
• Conferences
• Video communications and video conferences
• General drawing board
• All services through a pass-through internal subscriber number in the company.

This is what is called “enrichment” of the communication capabilities in the company, and how we see the combined communications here outperform the ordinary ones.

Findings.

In fact, to organize all these services by traditional means is not difficult. You can set up a SIP phone, Skype, ICQ, video conferencing and drawing software, arrange for transferring calls to the PBX, and set up routes. But it turns out difficult to manage a cocktail of logins, passwords, technologies, protocols, holes in security and privacy. With unified communication, all these services are integrated, quickly customizable, supervised by administrators, and easy to use. At least, that was how it was intended. Original articles on octopusline.ru