Uc Best Practices

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Top Ten Considerations when Evaluating Unified Communications Solutions
Introduction
Unified communications (UC) is an increasingly important investment for organizations looking to improve productivity and responsiveness while reducing their IT costs. The convergence of voice, video, and data communications around a shared IP-based infrastructure - allowing users to easily makea call, send a message, or join an audio or video conference - is bringing benefits to businesses of every size, industry, and geography. But how should you select an enterprise-class UC solution? UC is a rapidly evolving area, making it harder to predict future requirements. A narrow decision based on a single application - say, instant messaging (IM) - may limit your choices later when it comesto supporting smartphones, tablets, video, or social networking. Likewise, a UC deployment that does not adequately consider the implications on IT infrastructure - such as security, directories, media handling, application hosting, networking, and so on - could become problematic as the solution evolves beyond its original scope. The key is to build in sufficient flexibility to accommodate newdevelopments as your needs evolve, while extending the value of your existing IT investments, establishing immediate value, and promoting user adoption. We have prepared this document to help you navigate this path, by suggesting ten areas that you should consider when evaluating an enterprise-class unified communications solution.

1. Commitment to Investment Protection
A primary requirement isthat your existing investment in office software and supporting infrastructure be preserved, both now and as the UC solution expands over time. Here are five areas to consider:
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Office applications: Most companies have a significant investment in office software such as email, calendaring, and document sharing. Your UC solution should add complementary value to this software at both serverand desktop levels. The Cisco solution interoperates closely with Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, and SharePoint, and provides innovative features at both the user level (for example, with easy access to voice and video communication and enhanced presence) and administrator level (for example, with single call control and quality of service [QoS]). Additionally, Cisco does not market an email,calendaring, or document-management product, so has no conflicting agenda, and our products can also integrate with other office environments such as Google Apps if required.
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Desktop experience: Your investment in user productivity should not be disrupted. Your UC solution should fit in with your users’ current desktop experiences and enable them to be more productive without requiring them tolearn new behavior. The Cisco Unified Communications Solution provides value to users in an intuitive manner, such as: Comprehensive presence: Users can see “always-on” contextual presence information from within their familiar email or calendar or the unified communications client, sourced from any Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) or SIP for Instant Messaging and PresenceLeveraging Extensions (SIP/SIMPLE)-based system, including IBM SameTime, Microsoft Lync, GoogleTalk, AIM, Yahoo!, Facebook, and others, to give a comprehensive view of availability across the network.
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© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.

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Comprehensive connectivity: Users can also access high-quality voice, video, andconferencing capabilities from right-click menus or through the Microsoft Office ribbon, schedule a conference call that shows up in their native calendars, and communicate with mobile participants just as easily as their office-based colleagues.

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IT experience: The UC solution should also empower IT to offer higher service levels to the business without disrupting its current operations....