In This Part

Avoiding costly mistakes Finding out what unified communications can do for your organization Getting solutions that can help with any mobile strategy

In Part I, you found out that both your workforce and the expectations of your clients are changing, and that you need to meet the needs of that workforce and your clients. In this part, you discover a few of the solutions available to help in that quest.

In the world of competing solutions, you may feel overwhelmed at times. If so, you’ll find the information here helpful — you not only find guidance on how to select viable solutions but also get rock-solid suggestions for tools to help meet your mobile needs. These solutions will help your enterprise do the following:

Simplify worker communications, so they can do more and get more out of their day.

Help workers stay closely connected to clients, colleagues, and partners, no matter where they’re located, for faster client response and reduced employee downtime.

Give workers more control over their communications, empowering them to be more effective and satisfied at work.

The solutions presented here can help form a solid basis for your strategy. Keep them in mind as you read through Part III, where you discover how to develop your own strategy.

A solution isn’t really a solution unless it helps you solve a problem without causing additional, larger problems. The solutions in this part solve problems presented to most enterprises by an increasingly mobile workforce. Even so, if these solutions don’t fit into your overall mobility strategy, they may be just stopgap measures instead of real solutions. Review available solutions frequently as you develop your strategy, thereby making sure that there’s a good fit between the two.

Avoid Fads

Every day it seems that some new solution is being offered for telecommunications, particularly mobile communications. Discerning the gems among all the new products can be difficult, and in some cases downright dangerous (from a business standpoint).

The leading edge of technology is often called the “bleeding edge” for a reason. Many organizations that adopted brand-new technology later regretted the decision. New, unproven technology is prone to circumstances that can make your purchasing decision risky:

Proprietary technology: If the technology used in a product is unique to a single vendor, it may be here today and gone tomorrow. Vendors may make decisions that leave you with an “orphan product” in your business.

Limited service: New technology may not have a knowledgeable service network in place to provide the support you need when (not if) you develop problems with your systems.

Large expense: When a new technology is rolled out, the vendor seeks to recoup costs over the sales life of a limited number of products. If you purchase soon after a technology’s release, you may pay more for the technology than if you were to wait and allow it to mature.

Limited track record: Most new technologies have no in-field track record to analyze. Well-established, more mature, enterprise-class technologies often have clients and histories that you can look at to see what problems, if any, are inherent in the technology.

Establish Unified Communications

In any given workday, employees may transition through different modes as they perform their jobs. They may be road warriors as they commute to work, deskbound workers when they arrive in the office, and campus nomads in the afternoon. Another worker may smoothly transition between roles as a teleworker when working from home and a road warrior when visiting customers. Still other workers may be unexpectedly thrust into a situation where they need to take advantage of whatever mobile capabilities your organization has to offer.

Understanding the “mobility profile” of key employees is an important step in ensuring that your enterprise has the right communications capabilities, devices, and infrastructures to maximize individual productivity and effectiveness.

Although many office workers rely on communication functions such as voice mail, conferencing, and call transferring, many other communications applications are essential for performing their jobs and interacting with clients and colleagues. Extending communications tools such as departmental contact points, collaboration capabilities, interactive messaging, and other telephony features to your mobile workforce is where you generate real value for your organization.

Enterprise-class mobility gives you the ability to make all your communications tools available to all employees, regardless of their location or communications device, as if they were sitting at their office desk. Equally important, your employees benefit by maintaining a higher level of connection with the enterprise as a whole.

Avaya believes that any robust mobility solution must include a unified approach to meeting common business communications needs. Thus, a key component in meeting the mobile needs of your organization is unified communications: the concept that the most common methods of communicating (phone, fax, e-mail, and more) should be managed and accessed through a single infrastructure.

Avaya’s Unified Communication Center (UCC) uses voice recognition to access corporate information and communications tools from any phone. UCC provides the following features:

Speech access to voice messages from Avaya messaging systems and e-mail messages from Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino

Ability to address messages by voice using the voice mail directory, Microsoft Exchange or Lotus contacts, UCC contacts, and a corporate LDAP directory

Ability to play back voice mail; send, forward, reply to, and delete messages; and call the sender

Integrated text-to-speech technology so you can hear e-mails read to you over the phone (so that they can be accessed anywhere); use spoken e-mail commands, such as reply, reply all, send, forward, delete, and save; and even call the sender of the e-mail (handy when you’re listening to e-mail in your car)

Ability to immediately conference with anyone from your corporate directory or personal contacts

Single-number accessibility for users, regardless of their location

Management of personal contacts, calendar, and tasks from any location

Message navigation by message status (urgent, unread, read), media, and sender

With unified communications, historically separate communications methods can be accessed through a single ubiquitous interface — your voice speaking through the common

Implement VoIP

One of the most exciting developments in the world of communications is the convergence of voice and data in a common network infrastructure. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of voice over IP, or VoIP. This technology was alluded to in Part I. Although a full discussion is beyond the scope of this book, a quick introduction is in order — after all, VoIP can be integral to any successful mobility strategy.

IP is an acronym for Internet protocol. Trust me when I say that the technicalities of what IP is and how it works would bore you to tears. You need to know a little about how IP works, however, because it’s the basis on which the Internet works.

When you want to send something over the Internet, such as a message or a file, it isn’t sent as a whole. Instead, the larger item is broken up into smaller units called packets and then sent over the Internet to a destination. (The route followed from you to the destination is not important.) The packets are reassembled into an entire message, file, or what-have-you at the receiving end.

Voice over IP allows audio to be sent over the Internet using the same technology that has been used for decades to send messages and files. This means that voice communications, which were the purview of phone companies, can be packetized and sent over the same networks already used for an organization’s existing data.

Although VoIP is still relatively new, the technologies on which it is based are both mature and proven — key elements in building a cost-effective and robust strategy for your mobile workers.

For more information on VoIP, refer to VoIP For Dummies, Avaya Limited Edition (Wiley).

Explore Potential Solutions

As mentioned, when seeking to provide mobile solutions, you need to avoid those that are simply fads — here today and gone tomorrow. By sifting through the dross out there, you can find some gold that will help you create a solid basis for your mobile strategy.

This section highlights some of the more promising solutions available. A few are tried and true, and others are relatively new but based on solid technologies.

Presence and availability

One of the most popular applications for the Internet (besides e-mail and the Web) is IM, or instant messaging. Instant messaging programs, such as AOL’s AIM and Windows Messenger, allow users to establish instant text-based contact with a “buddy list” of friends and acquaintances.

In the mobile workplace, the concepts of presence and availability help extend the buddy-list idea even further. With presence, the network instantly knows that you’re online, what devices you have, and how to best reach you. Because the network knows your devices, your buddies know which media (text-messaging, e-mail, phone, or video-phone) you are available through. Co-workers can then choose the most effective medium for reaching you, and you know the best way to reach them.

Part II: Meeting Your Needs 29

Availability gives you control over who knows whether or not you are available. Thus, you can control whether you are out of the loop during certain parts of the day, allowing you to focus without interruption and making your day more productive.

Together, presence and availability features give everyone in the enterprise a “peek over the cubicle wall” capability. The result is better accessibility, lower response time, and easier mobilization of team members.

IP applications for contact-center agents

Teleworking is finally coming of age, thanks to specialized IP softphones integrated with contact-center software. This powerful combination enables communications workers, such as reservations agents and help-desk personnel, to work from remote locations — even from their homes.

Due to IP softphone capabilities, remote workers enjoy access to the same data and communications tools they would have if situated together in an expensive, centralized contact center. Managers can still manage far-flung personnel, because they retain the same monitoring capabilities they would have in a central location, such as monitoring the status of inbound calls, outbound calls, and which workers are handling which calls.

The bottom line for the enterprise is that they get cost-effective contact-center performance, a larger labor pool to draw from, and tremendous operational flexibility.

Cellular integration

In an increasingly mobile workplace, you can’t always count on workers to be near their desk phones. A new crop of communications applications allows calls to be transparently bridged from a desk phone (or an organization’s phone system) to any digital cell phone or wireless service provider. These applications show great promise for providing workers with a single universal phone number for connectivity.

Cellular integration also allows the mobile worker to transfer calls, conference with additional parties, and place and answer calls on multiple lines, just like at a desk phone. Access to these common desk-phone communications tools allows workers to increase productivity even while on the road. It no longer matters whether workers are in or out of the office — even if they are in a car, at a hotel, or at a client’s location — as long as they have access to a cellular signal.

Unified voice, Web, and video conferencing

Several solutions described so far allow you to extend helpful communications tools, such as conference calling, to mobile workers. Using any of those tools, your worker can lead or participate in a conference call, regardless of where he or she is physically located.

You can conference in other ways, however. Many new applications also allow you to use your data networks to initiate Web conferences. In these, users can see, on-screen, what each other participant is seeing. Thus, you could demo a new product, share ideas in a collective document, or evaluate a Web site. Each participant can “mark” something on-screen, and the other participants see the mark and can add their own.

Advancements in video technology have also made video conferencing over existing data networks a reality. Gone are the days when video conferencing required dedicated facilities and expensive usage charges. Using inexpensive Web cams, users can conference so that each participant can see the other participants. The result is a face-to-face meeting where the “faces” are in different rooms, in different buildings, or in different places around the world.