Unified Communications Heats up this Month
Over the next few weeks I have a lot going on in the world
of Unified Communications (UC) that I am excited to share with you. Today, I
want to touch on some of the great new features of Exchange 2010 that can save
organizations both time and money. Tomorrow, I will be looking at a new
possibility that OCS 2007 R2 brings to a company's IT support center. And next
week I will be hosting a Webcast on Technet where we will be talking about
Unified Communications as a concept and as a real world problem solver with an
expert from the Microsoft team. Stay tuned because this is getting exciting!!!
First, there is the release of Exchange 2010 a week ago
which brings UC to a whole new level. If you have not seen the advances that
Exchange 2010 brings to Unified Communications, you are really missing out.
Exchange 2007 introduced UC capabilities to Microsoft's email offerings
allowing for users to receive voice-mail in the Outlook Inbox, thereby making
it possible to reply and forward voice mail as easily as email. It also allowed
for the management of voice-mail using Managed Folders allowing users to apply
the same set of retention rules to voice-mail and can be applied to email.
Now with Exchange 2010, Unified Communications are taken
to new levels presenting users with the ability to not only listen to, but also
read, their voice-mail. This capability exists in both Outlook as well as
Outlook Web App (OWA), making it available for users in an office as well as
mobile users outside of our wired environments. This new ability extends to
more than simply reading through voice-mail too, it allows a user to read a
voice-mail and select any point in the text where they wish to begin listening,
then play the remaining message from that point forward in audio format. The
time savings this brings to organizations is enormous. No longer do people have
to listen to 5 or 10 minutes worth of voice-mail just to get to the important
30 seconds of information that they need to do their jobs. Even more
importantly, critical information no longer gets missed when someone is trying
to weed through a long voice-mail to pick out the parts that really matter, and
we are seeing more and more every day how lost information can often be more
important than the information that is made available.
I shared a couple of weeks ago some of my calculations
that I now use to show real Return On Investment in my daily job.
These numbers boil down to "for every 250 users that an organization has
at an average pay of $15/hour, each 2 minutes saved per day equals a savings of
$32, 500.00 per year". I think that you can easily see how this new
addition to Exchange 2010 can very quickly and easily add up to 10's of
thousands of dollars in savings for each and every organization deploying this
new product.
As I mentioned at the start, check back throughout the
coming weeks as we delve into the new and exciting doors that Microsoft is
opening to organizations like yours and like mine, with their Unified
Communications initiative.
Tim Vander Kooi has worked in the Information Technology industry for 15 years. He has worked primarily with small and midsized businesses, building Microsoft-centric network infrastructures in both IT Professional and IT Manager positions. Tim loves to share his real world expertise in many user forums and online community sites having been named a Microsoft MVP- System Center Operations Manager/System Center Essentials in 2007. Vander Kooi’s passion for IT does not stop there. He has been involved in user-group communities for over 10 years, currently serving as Chairman of the Board for Culminis North America and President of Microsoft IT Pros of Tulsa. Tim’s vision for the IT Community is one that shares knowledge and real world solutions to help all of IT succeed.
