COLLABORATION

Companies with multiple locations need collaboration strategies that allow their individuals, teams, customers and partners to intelligently connect and interact. Much of this is driven by the following major business trends:

	Technology advances and the need to work outside of normal business hours and locations foster an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce. Knowing who to contact as well as when, where and how to reach them is critical to business success.
	Web 2.0 tools such as video portals, podcasts, blogs, wikis and discussion forums are changing the way in which information is created, published, managed and consumed. Never before have such massive amounts of data been available. Never before has it been so difficult for people to process and prioritize information.
	A flood of new devices and applications are entering the corporate IT environment as people elect to merge consumer-based tools with standardized communications. IT now faces unprecedented challenges in deciding whether to support these tools, which impact business privacy, policy and security.
	Businesses of every size work with outside suppliers, partners or contractors. Working together, efficiently and effectively, across corporate boundaries and time zones poses real challenges.

Without intervention these trends can have a dramatic impact on businesses: slowing key business processes, reducing responsiveness to customers and market trends and causing missed opportunities.

Through the right blend of these technologies for your organization you can build trust and accelerate decisions with rich, reliable interactions, quickly form teams across boundaries, companies and continents, provide customers with instant access to experts, effectively share the most relevant business information and flexibly integrate existing and new collaboration technologies – either on-premises, on-demand or using a blended approach – to ensure technology is always delivering real business outcomes.

	Desktop Integration
	Collaboration Enabled Business Transformation (CEBT)
	Visual Communication
	Messaging
	Conferencing
	Enterprise Social Software
	Mobility
	Ancillary

Desktop Integration
Desktop Integration enables the numerous communication and information management applications within a single organization to be brought together into a single multi-media interface in order to simplify and automate business processes to the greatest extent possible. It can enable the unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected application or data sources in the enterprise.

Collaboration Enabled Business Transformation (CEBT)
Despite sophisticated business applications, human intervention is still required in nearly every process, resulting in delays, multiple hand-offs and missed opportunities. On-demand, end-to-end solutions can integrate real-time communications into business applications and processes enabling companies to reduce human latency, respond quickly to customer needs, close sales faster, mitigate risk exposure and capitalize on opportunities ahead of the competition.

Visual Communication
Visual Communication can be as simple as a conversation between two people in private offices (point-to-point) or involve several sites (multi-point) with more than one person at different sites. Besides the audio and visual transmission of meeting activities, video conferencing can be used to share documents and computer-displayed information. Streaming visual media is increasingly being used as a vehicle for enhancing internal communications and engaging people more fully.

Messaging
Unified Messaging brings e-mail, voicemail, SMS and fax into a single message store, allowing the user to send, retrieve and access messages from any device or any location. Users can benefit from leading unified messaging solutions that enable employees to access and deliver messages anywhere on any device using e-mail, IM and voicemail - all with the ability to see the recipient’s availability to receive communications.

Conferencing
Multimedia conferencing tools integrate voice, video and existing web conferencing capabilities, bringing people together into a ‘virtual office’. These technologies extend the reach of your company’s people with advanced audio, web and video conferencing capabilities that are an easy and productive way to share ideas with anyone, anywhere. It combines real-time desktop sharing with phone conferencing so everyone sees the same thing while the team discusses.

Enterprise Social Software
ESS can help your workforce become more competitive, responsive and productive by making it easy to find available experts, form dynamic teams, share valuable information and navigate rich media. It can also help your company’s people personalize experiences with seamless integration across social media such as blogs, wikis and instant messaging and shorten sales cycles and product lifecycles that rely on finding expertise in an instant.

Mobility
Mobility applications can increase mobile employee productivity and responsiveness to customers, while controlling mobile costs, by making mobile devices extensions of the enterprise network. Software applications for mobile handsets can extend communication applications and services to mobile phones and smart phones regardless of manufacturer.

Ancillary
There are a host of business function specific applications that can align to the unique needs of your company. These include call recording for law firms, phone ordering functionality for hotels and trading turrets for financial firms to name a few.

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