#ucomms

Mobility on the road

With myPortal for Mobile/Tablet and OpenScape’s One Number Service, your field staff have just one number that will reach them regardless of their location or choice of device. This takes away the problem of having to remember multiple phone numbers to reach someone on the move, and keeps your staff fully available for your customers. In addition, myPortal for Mobile/Tablet also provides users with extensive UC functions including presence, favourites list, voicemail, call journals, and much more, to fully integrate them into your enterprise communications system. The portal’s browser-based approach also means virtually any type of smartphone or tablet can be integrated.

 Mobility in the office

A number of site-based cordless solutions are available to ensure ‘roaming’ staff can always be contacted by colleagues and customers. Cordless choices include both DECT and WLAN models to ensure a suitable solution is available. OpenScape’s Desk Sharing solution reduces costs by providing the capability for occasional office users to share a desk phone. Users simply enter a PIN-code to download their personal phone settings.

 Mobility for home workers

Thanks to OpenScape Business, home workers can use the same voice and UC features at home as if they were in the office. For convenience, the CallMe! feature automatically forwards all office calls to the home phone, meaning the employee is always reachable via their office phone number. Whenever a home worker wants to make a work-related call, they simply dial the contact from their UC client and OpenScape Business then calls them on their home phone and establishes the link to the destination contact. This has the twin advantage of displaying the office number to the called party (rather than the employee’s home number) and ensuring that the call costs are automatically billed to the company

 When to Consider Unified Communications

If your old phone system can no longer be supported.

If you are moving premises

If your business is growing and you want to “reach the next level”

If you’ve lost too many sales because opportunities are not getting to the right people quickly enough

If you hear too many (or any) negative customer service stories.

If your employees work from the road or out of the office—and you and your customers can’t reach them

Lloyds IP can provide OpenScape Office UC suite giving excellent, affordable multi-media contact centre functionality for 1 – 64 customer services staff.

 Public clouds. Public cloud services are based on a standard model in which the service provid­ers offer their customers access to technology resources such as servers and applications. These services are typically provided on a ‘pay as you go’ model or monthly subscription basis.

Organisations find public clouds appealing for various reasons. One is that the services are easy to start up and use. Another is the relatively low set up costs - hardware and other costs are cov­ered by the service provider, not by the customer.

Also, public clouds can generate additional cost savings and efficiency improvements because organiations pay for only the resources they use. Public cloud services also scale easily, so compa­nies can expand or reduce capacity as their needs change.

Within the public cloud category there are sev­eral types of services, including:

Software as a service (SaaS) or “on-demand” software, in which software and data are hosted in the cloud and are accessed by users via the Internet

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), in which service providers offer access to resources such as virtualised servers in the cloud

Platform as a service (PaaS), in which ser­vice providers offer a computing platform that typically includes an operating sys­tem, programming language, database and Web server

  Private clouds. For organisations that are looking to reap many of the benefits of cloud computing but don’t want to use public cloud services, pri­vate clouds are another option. Private clouds are operated for a single organisation, and involve the use of a proprietary network or data centre that uses cloud computing technologies such as server virtualisation.

In many cases, private clouds are managed by the organization that is using the service. However, in some cases, they’re managed by a third-party service provider. These services can be hosted internally or externally.

Private clouds are designed to offer some of the same benefits and capabilities as public cloud offer­ings as well as other advantages, such as greater control over applications and data. Because of this, private clouds can help organisations meet the security and compliance requirements for certain industries. They also tend to be less ‘one-size-fits-all’ in nature, allowing companies to build more customised solutions. For example, they can support integrations into proprietary back-end systems, or special business process flows. While public clouds are suitable for applications that are more like utilities, private clouds suit applications that are differentiated within the business.

  Hybrid clouds. Another variant is the hybrid cloud, which involves both private cloud and pub­lic cloud services. Hybrid clouds can be delivered by service providers that offer a private cloud and that partner with a public cloud provider. They can also be offered by public cloud providers that work directly with an organisation that manages its own private cloud.

A hybrid cloud environment lets companies deliver some IT resources in house while others are provided externally. For example, a company might use a private cloud for unified communica­tions (UC) and a public cloud offering for disaster recovery and business continuity.

By allowing organizations to leverage the cost efficiencies of public clouds and still keep some applications in a private cloud, hybrid models pro­vide flexibility. A hybrid cloud architecture requires that a company have both on-premises resources and off-site, server-based cloud infrastructure.

In addition to being able to use the chat feature, desktop and video sharing, it is now possible to select a presenter and to assign control rights to respective users.

Functions such as the authorisation control of participants, selection of the moderator, and the option to disconnect individual users from a session make using the mobile Unify OpenScape Web Collaboration App even more transparent and flexible. Conferences that were scheduled earlier can now be started directly from the mobile app.

Unify OpenScape Web Collaboration provides simple and fast access to powerful features including desktop and application sharing, file sharing, co-browsing, white-boarding, URL push, IM chat and multi-party video chat. It allows participants to easily transition from one media (chat, web, and video) to another with a single click. The solution is kept secure by 256-bit AES end to end encryption.

Call us now on 0844 855 0456 for a demonstration or fill out the ENQUIRY form

The ability to move applications, data, hardware and services to the Cloud has many benefits which include:

Significant cost savings achieved through shared services

Savings on in-house IT resource – see below

Almost infinite scalability of servers and storage

Flexible on demand resources

Removal of back end maintenance and monitoring

Resilient, Secure UK data centres with 247/365 support