Harnessing the benefits of unified communications

The Royal Agricultural Society’s Stoneleigh Park show ground is galloping ahead with unified communications. Pic: Dave Hamster

Advances in communications hardware and software, coupled with improvements in network bandwidth and reliability, have given rise to new unified communications (UC) platforms that offer firms a wealth of new collaborative opportunities.

A survey by Orange Business Services published late last year, which canvassed the opinions of 600 chief information officers (CIOs) from multinational corporations, estimated that 15 per cent were trialling or evaluating a UC system, with six per cent having already implemented a solution.

A separate, ad hoc poll of 100 communications professionals conducted by Siemens Enterprise Communications in 2009 found that just over half – 51 per cent – were already using UC systems in some capacity, with 17 per cent saying they were already using “a full unified communications” system. Fifty one per cent also said they believed that UC systems would be widely adopted among enterprises before 2012.

But despite the technology’s potential to facilitate new, more innovative ways of working, what pushes most organisations to roll out UC platforms tends to be rather mundane: existing telephone systems reaching end of life, or no longer being able to support the number of users required.

“The primary reason for our UC deployment was that our Philips Sofitel system had come to the end of its life, while we were also moving to a new location,” says Stewart Page, assistant director of IT at the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE), which last year replaced its nine-year-old digital telephone system with a ShoreTel UC platform.

The system provides IP telephony services to the many exhibitors attending RASE events at its Stoneleigh Park show ground in Warwickshire, and helps the society improve customer service by monitoring calls more efficiently. The deployment covers about 230 IP extensions within the show ground’s exhibition and conference areas, with a smaller number of analogue extensions running into the system as well.

Like many organisations deploying UC for the first time, RASE is taking a gradual approach to harnessing the more advanced Web 2.0 features available on ShoreTel’s UC platform, such as instant messaging (IM), videoconferencing, unified messaging and presence.

“We are aware of those features and will possibly look at them in the future, but it is not something we are doing at the moment,” says Page. “The reason we chose ShoreTel is that we wanted the flexibility of being able to grow the system over time.”

Resilience
Ensuring the underlying data network has the bandwidth and reliability to support IP voice traffic and other UC features is fundamental to any implementation’s success, which is why UC installations often run in parallel with local (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) upgrades.

A simultaneous network upgrade formed part of the UC implementation carried out by the NHS Kensington and Chelsea Primary Care Trust, for example. It will roll out Siemens Enterprise Communications Group’s Open­Scape UC platform on an Enterasys LAN later this year, after almost three years of planning and testing.

The network will eventually deliver IP telephony and data communications to staff using PCs and handheld devices at eight locations, as well as partner sites such as GP and dental surgeries, starting with the St Charles Community Hospital.

“It has been built to cater for a host of demands, and not just as a telephony system, but to include things such as call centre handling, voicemail and mobility,” says Ken Pear­son, the Trust’s telecommunications manager.

Mobile connectivity
Every one of the 700 users at the St Charles hospital will be given a Siemens OptiPoint VoIP handset, and doctors and nurses travelling offsite for home visits will access the HiPath DAKs digital alarm and conference server.

The DAKS server supports a range of UC features, including messaging, presence, conferencing and text display, and St Charles staff use it to record their movements with a central server that keeps track of their whereabouts and activities via mobile phones.

“Users carry a mobile device that notifies a central database of their movements, logging the destination and raising an alarm if nothing further is heard or that person cannot be contacted,” says Pearson.

Extending UC features to mobile devices while simultaneously building a high-bandwidth LAN/WAN to support high volumes of voice and data traffic was also part of the rationale behind multinational manufacturing company Element Six’s decision to implement a Cisco UC system.

Based in Shannon, Ireland, the company operates from 22 locations worldwide, producing synthetic diamond and other engineering materials for use in the optical, mechanical, thermal, electronic, automotive, telecommunications and medical industries.

With almost 4,000 employees, Element Six was looking to bring down international travel and communication costs running to millions of euros per year by finding new ways to collaborate and share information.

It implemented Cisco’s UC system across a WAN linking its 22 offices. The implementation involved deploying 2,000 IP telephones alongside collaboration tools such as Lotus Notes and Sametime IM to help employees stay in constant touch. It uses Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager IP PBX platform and Unity UM software to route calls to the appropriate extension, voicemail box or email address.

“The onus used to be on callers to decide whether to use email, the landline or a mobile, and determine the person’s location and time zone. Now we just call the extension number and the technology sorts it out,” says Element Six group i nformation manager Patrick Seeber.

The company also installed Cisco dual-mode GSM/Wi-Fi mobile phones over WLANs linked to the same vendors’ unified communications system, allowing employees to make mobile calls using Wi-Fi when in range, saving money on calls that would usually be routed via mobile operator networks.