Employees everywhere are being overwhelmed by the sheer number of messages, assailing them at any given time. E-mail, faxes, voice mail… seems like everybody wants a piece of you! Unified communications — a single message store intelligently linked to any number of productivity enhancing applications — can help increase an employee’s ability to handle the deluge, and increase levels of customer service and communications. As presence permeates networks, applications such as unified communications become more valuable to users as they improve efficiency and create exciting new methods of staying connected. Come explore the state of unified communications and see what the effects of marrying presence to existing applications will have on your corporate environment.

Come hear true tales of deployment from IP fax veterans who have a wealth of experience designing and implementing money-saving next-generation fax products and services. Attend this session and you will learn and benefit from their firsthand knowledge. You’ll gain insights into the problems they encountered, the mistakes they made and the lessons they learned — and in the process avoid costly backtracking, false starts, and delays in your own next-generation network strategy. This is truly a can’t-miss session for those of you interested in hearing a real-life tale from the trenches.

Network managers and users alike consider traditional telephone calls highly secure. As calls move from circuit-switched networks to packet-switched networks, we must make sure to take precautions. Threats include eavesdropping on confidential calls, hijacking of system resources, surreptitious launches of denial of service attacks, and more. Precautions must apply whether calls travel over the Internet or an Intranet. And of course, the proliferation of WI-Fi into enterprise networks carries with it its own set of security challenges. This session will look at authentication, which applies to packet headers, as well as encryption, which applies to packet payloads. Topics of discussion will include the various security mechanisms being used today (IPSec, DES/Triple DES, PGP, etc…) as well as the multitude of security threats facing your enterprise and what can be done about them.

There is no substitute for dealing with people face-to-face when important business objectives must be achieved. But with business travel suffering its steepest decline in years, companies need to research alternatives to hitting the road. Today's leading-edge IP-based video conferencing and collaborative computing technologies allow users to fully interact and share applications and documents as if they were in the same room, enabling efficiencies never before attainable through traditional means. Attendees will learn about the various collaboration products and conferencing applications available, the benefits of their use, and the special considerations related to their successful deployment.

Remote offices provide both boon and bane to enterprises. While offering presence in multiple markets, the cost of putting an infrastructure between those offices is often a hurdle, as is implementing the effective links in the communications systems of those offices. Security issues, QoS, voice and video services, and unified messaging are all aspects that need to be considered when installing an IP telephony solution in remote offices. Discover the new generation of solutions now available that promise new levels of efficiency and productivity for your staff.

Before you add IP telephony to your network, you'll have to first be certain that your network can handle voice. At the very least, you need a 100-Mbps Ethernet backbone. You'll need to be sure you have the latest Cat5 wiring to support the needs of packet voice running on your LAN. And there are other considerations as well: Is every desktop supported? Are your switches and routers up to snuff? Have you considered power over Ethernet to supply the phones with power? What about adequate power protection and UPS backup? Do you have the tools in place, to analyze network performance including jitter, delay, and latency? Come learn what you need to know to upgrade your data network to handle voice.