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United Communications

7/1/2007

By Matt Villano

Once you’ve leveraged your existing infrastructure and evaluated your e-mail environment, what’s the next step? You’ve got to plan your transition to IP telephony. Ultimately, you need to consider what we call the “Three C’s”: compliance, confidentiality, and capacity. Each school needs to figure out how critical these three issues are. The latest release of our technology, for example, includes a version of unified messaging that enables enterprises to keep messages as confidential as possible. Whether that’s more important than the other C’s is up to each customer.

As schools move closer to UC, how much do they need to think about which technologies they should keep? This is what I call the “table stakes” conversation. Meaning, schools must sit down and say, “Here’s what we have. Here’s what we need. Here’s where we want to be. Here’s how we plan to get there.” You want to be careful to roll stuff over in an integrated, thoughtful fashion, so you don’t end up with a solution that doesn’t meet your requirements going forward.

Is the legacy user interface an issue in converting to UC? It can be, but there are many solutions that have emulation capabilities. At AVST, we’ve built four of the major legacy telephone user interfaces into our product, so they can be provisioned on a user-by-user basis. So if one member of the faculty loves the Octel interface, but somebody else comes from an institution that used Centigram, they can each use what makes them comfortable. While that sounds like it might be an administrative nightmare, we’ve been able to do it—and it ends up facilitating the organization’s transition to UC.

Are two other goals of UC to enhance administration and reduce costs? Of course. You want to reduce the workload, and you want to centralize administration. You also want to allocate the administration responsibilities to different segments of the IT staff. All of those things help reduce costs.

In which UC features are schools most interested? Notification capabilities: The ability for the system to tell me that someone is trying to find me, that someone’s left me a message. That’s a big one, and it will only continue to become more important as the workforce becomes more mobile down the road.

Do schools tend to overspend when they buy into UC? It’s important to buy only what you need. You may have a certain segment of the faculty that just wants to have traditional voicemail, but you also may have other members of the faculty who are very e-mailcentric and highly mobile. In general, economics is a critical issue. There’s great technology out there for a good price, and I encourage everyone to conduct the investigation and determine the best way to get UC at a fair and reasonable price.

Matt Villano is senior contributing editor of this publication.