Unified communications is more than a fad. The buzzword is a fundamental shift in how people communicate, enabling some of the new communications channels that have emerged from the Internet revolution.
Key among those are video conferencing, chat, and presence, in addition to the mobility that voice over IP (VoIP) brings to voice calling.
One of the leading unified communication (UC) solutions is Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync, the evolved version of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server. Lync makes sense on a number of levels, not least of which is its integration with the Office tools that every business professional is already familiar with.
Another reason that Lync draws so much attention in the UC space is because of its UC ecosystem.
“Companies are looking to see who has done it [UC], how has it turned out, is it a full solution for rip and replace of dial tone and the rest of the unified communications workloads,” Jon Sastre, president of Conquest, told TMCnet during ITEXPO (News - Alert) earlier this year. “When you look at Lync and see that it is not only that, but you have giant companies that are using it, that have been using it, and now with Lync 2013 and all the new technologies that AudioCodes (News - Alert) and others have provided, it is a really comprehensive ecosystem that can come in and really help you find ways to find value.”
Kevin Fox at CommLogik concurs.
“Lync is the first solution Microsoft has come out with that depends on third-party elements in order to really deliver a full solution,” he told us also at ITEXPO.
That’s because unified communications is a strategy more than a particular product or service. Every customer needs a custom-built solution that fits their business, which is why Lync has a strong UC ecosystem and why businesses need to navigate that ecosystem to get the most out of Lync.
Helping businesses do that is an upcoming webinar hosted by Tone Software (News - Alert) and sponsored in part by TMCnet.
Titled “Taming the Collaboration Beast: 5 Key Strategies to Manage Lync Enabled UC Ecosystems,” the webinar will look at how businesses can effectively integrate Lync into their communications infrastructure while ensuring quality, performance, and availability of both traditional voice and UC collaboration services.
The webinar will look at key strategies and tactics to overcome complexity and chaos when integrating UC, critical steps necessary to ensure quality, how to equip and empower a UC team to operate more effectively and cost efficiently to support Lync enabled UC ecosystems, and ways to ensure a business’ overall UC delivery paradigm is properly architected and aligned to meet the service expectations of users, clients and stakeholders.
The webinar takes place Oct 22, 2013 at 2 p.m. (EDT), and those interested can register here.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson