Defining the scope of your Unified Communications deployment

Businesses of all size face a fundamental question when planning for a UC deployment...

Is it best to (1)continue to use multiple vendors or (2) select a single vendor to deliver all UC functionality?

Organizations that choose option #1 do so to minimize loss of functionality by selecting the best technology/platform for each business requirement.

Organizations that choose option #2 do so to streamline the user experience and reduce the number of platforms / passwords that users have to manage. 

There are benefits and challenges with each approach. 

When building your UC strategy, here are 5 questions to ask stakeholders that will help answer the big question up top!

1) Rank (in order of importance) which of the following workloads will bring the most value to your day-to-day at the office:

o   Voice and Telephony

o   Conferencing

o   Messaging

o   Presence and IM

o   Clients

o   Communication Applications

o   Document Sharing

2) How quickly (in months) would you like to have access to the above workloads?

3) Which of the following will drive the decision most: Cost, Functionality, or Reliability?

4) What existing / future business applications do we want to integrate with our UC solution? (CRM, Call Center?)

5) On a scale of 1-10, how important is it to have a single user interface, login/password drives our UC solution? 

Once you collect the answers to the above questions, you'll be ready to start evaluating providers to find your ideal UC solution.