This article first appeared on Best in UC.

Following the overwhelming success of the Apple iPad, it seems that everyone is jumping on the tablet bandwagon. The latest figures from Apple show unit sales topping $25 million in just over 15 months. That may be more iPads than McDonald’s burgers purchased in a similar amount of time. It’s certainly more tablets than all competitors combined.

Applications drive hardware, and the iPad debuted in April 2010 with a huge advantage, carrying the approximately a half million apps over from the iPhone. Check out these statistics from Apple’s app store:

Total active apps (currently available for download): 449,581
Total inactive apps (no longer available for download): 109,446
Total apps seen in U.S. app store: 559,027
Number of active publishers in the U.S. app store: 100,108

It certainly makes sense for Samsung, RIM, Motorola and others to tackle this market, as they are device manufacturers used to churning out large numbers of widgets. But what gives with Avaya and Cisco, the giant enterprise unified communications (UC) players, trying to compete? Keep in mind that consumer device manufacturers haven’t exactly smoked Apple to date in this competition.

Cisco has introduced its tablet offering, the Cius, to underwhelming fanfare from the enterprise market it owns for routing and switching. The 7-inch device is full-featured, offers one-click connection to WebX (owned by Cisco), and is integrated with the proprietary Cisco Telepresence world. Cisco even rolled out a proprietary app store, cleverly named AppHQ, which replicates many of the apps seen in Apple’s storefront. I’ve often said there just aren’t enough app stores out there.

At about $1,000, the Cius is premium priced and may eventually sell in the thousands to giant Cisco clients who will find the product surreptitiously bundled with the enterprise products they purchase on a regular basis. And the tablet has, of all things, an Ethernet jack! Prepare to carry a very long CAT 6 cable about, as the idea of a tablet is portability. Cisco just cannot resist selling Ethernet ports!

But why? Spending this type of research and development dollars to produce a me-too product is just not Cisco’s usual modus operendi. Maybe the misstep with the Flip video camera was not their only gaffe. I cannot see where this product will add any significant revenue to a company that really needs it right now. And why divert resources away from making the Nexus product as reliable and as cost-efficient as the aged 6500 series platform it replaces? My poll of Cisco resellers across the nation indicates that they are just not buying into the Cius vision, and the recent Cisco Live! event confirmed that most partners are scratching their heads over this introduction.

Then there is Avaya, which has strayed even farther afield with its Flare tablet. Although the device is really just the front-end for the entire UC experience Avaya calls Flare, the nearly $2,000 price tag for an Andriod tablet is stunning. Also surprising is its hefty 3.5-pound weight. The UI is fantastic, but dedicating $2,000 for every conference room for a glorified remote control is outside the budget of all but the most die-hard Avaya fans or technologists with unlimited funds at their disposal. With 8,000 iPads leaving the dock daily and thousands of new apps each month, why would anyone try to mandate a proprietary system in an enterprise network? And who wants to carry around three and a half pounds of hardware with a very limited capability? But boy it sure has a cool interface!

ShoreTel unveiled its strategy at the corporation’s annual Partner Summit in Chicago last month. The company cleverly used the ubiquitous iPad as a desktop UC interface to enable all the applications associated with the ShoreWare UC platform.

ShoreTel, instead of re-inventing the tablet, chose to announce a high-quality docking station with a top-notch speakerphone and ergonomic handset. Yes, they may cut into their traditional IP desk set sales, but enabling unified communications users is the real end game. The station will support the iPhone and iPad at the outset, but eventually it will work with all major smartphone and tablet devices. The station has VGA/DVI output, as well as USB and Bluetooth interfaces for monitor and keyboard if desired. Pricing is said to be in the $200 to $400 range, which seems to make a great deal of sense for the millions of corporate iPad and iPhone users that want to integrate their mobile technology to the corporate PBX.

Gee, why didn’t the big guys think of this?

This article first appeared on Best in UC.

Companies are buying into the concept of video conferencing at a healthy clip. But when your company makes the investment in a video conferencing solution, how can you maximize its use by getting your employees on board?

First, it’s helpful to recognize the three most common reasons employees resist video conferencing:

1. Video-phobia. For some workers, the idea of being live on TV, as it were, is incredibly intimidating. Underlying this fear is the dislike of learning new technologies. Employees might assume that video conferencing is difficult to master, despite the super-easy technologies now available to consumers and businesses alike.
2. Longing for privacy. Employees, especially mobile workers, have become consummate multi-taskers. When sitting at their desks on conference calls, they may be answering e-mail, conducting business via instant messenger, or even eating lunch. For some who work out of their home or their car, phone calls are a great time to commute to their next stop, cook dinner or fold laundry. These employees may be loathe to give up their multi-tasking time, while also disliking the idea of having to look presentable and be “on” all the time.
3. Preference for personal interaction. Certain segments of your workforce rely on personal relationships to succeed in their jobs. For example, the sales force may prefer face-to-face conversations with potential clients, believing this is the best ticket to closing a deal. They don’t wish to replace these interactions with technology.

So how can your organization overcome these challenges and get the most out of video conferencing? Try these strategies:

1. Overcome the technical pushback. This starts with your video conferencing buying decision. We recommend easy-to-use solutions from LifeSize, which can be started and stopped with the touch of a button. In addition, some companies are extending their unified communications solutions (UC) to incorporate desktop video. This can be ideal, since your employees are already familiar with your UC technologies, making the addition of a video conferencing module relatively easy.
2. Provide training, as needed. Still got some technophobes in the office? Take advantage of LifeSize’s built-in training modules, which take the fear out of video conferencing. Or, ask your IT staff to provide some simple training via the video conferencing system, which will make for some hands-on experience.
3. Explain your goals. Information overcomes fear. Tell employees how you want the company to benefit from video conferencing. This technology might be used to cut travel expenses, build stronger teams, enhance client relationships or create better work/life balance. Frame these benefits in such a way that employees see how video conferencing can help them meet their business and personal goals. This will create buy-in.
4. Set rules for when to use video conferencing. Where does it make the most sense to use video technologies? Look for those opportunities and requires video conferencing to play a part. For example, these might include sales meetings, cross-departmental meetings, executive sessions or human resources training classes.
5. Encourage extension of video conferencing into other value-added activities. Suggest ways the sales force can use video conferencing to meet a new prospect. Help managers leverage the technology to bring far-flung teams closer together. Rather than making the technology intrusive, continually seek out ways it can help employees do their jobs effectively.

The most common mobile phone applications are still e-mail, voice and calendar. So does it make sense to transition your employees from cheaper mobile phones to smartphones?

For many workers, smartphones definitely pay for themselves in both savings and productivity. This is particularly true for mobile workers such as salespeople, delivery and repair personnel, and on-site consultants.

Many of our clients rely on a combination of smartphones and a ShoreTel unified communication solution. ShoreTel Mobility’s RoamAnywhere Client for mobile devices offers all the features found on a desk phone, such as a company directory, voicemail access, presence information and more. Plus, RoamAnywhere makes it easy for users to manage email, instant messaging and other communications while on the go.

With the power of a smartphone, workers can employ many strategies to improve their effectiveness and efficiency – helping the technology not only pay for itself, but provide positive return on investment as well:

1. Mobile email. When employees can send and receive emails on the go, they can speed up customer service requests, access critical information, and generally do their job more productively.
2. Fewer phone calls. With a smartphone, employees can access critical information via text message, instant message, email or app. They are less likely to call a colleague at the home office searching for information, which wastes the time of yet another person. Plus, when colleagues and customers know they can reach a mobile worker via email, they are more likely to communicate this way. The result? Less time spent on voicemail, fewer costly cellular minutes and lower phone bills.
3. Reduced drive time. What if your mobile workforce could skip their drive to the office and go directly to their first assignment or sales call instead? With a smartphone, employees can retrieve email and other information on the go, rather than being forced to visit the office. If your company reimburses for mileage or pays for company cars, a smartphone can shorten commutes and save you big bucks. Plus, employees can use that formerly wasted commute time to work on productive tasks.
4. Less getting lost. Most smartphones offer advanced mapping features and turn-by-turn directions, including GPS. If your mobile workforce spends less time getting lost, they will spend more time working. Plus, you can avoid buying more costly in-vehicle navigation systems.
5. Easy documentation. Smartphones include built-in cameras and video capabilities that are simple to use. Mobile workers can use these to document problems at client sites. When problems arise at remote sites, colleagues at the home office can receive photos or videos for further analysis. Finally, apps such as Apple’s FaceTime enable the mobile workforce to conduce a quick video conference from any location.

Want to frustrate an employee? Give them a stack of work and a computer, but hamper their productivity with an out-of-date network connection.

We have all experienced the annoyance of a slow Internet connection. But as companies adopt more and more bandwidth-hungry applications, it might not be your connection to the outside world presenting a problem. Rather, you and your employees may be plagued by a slow Local Area Network (LAN).

In most offices, Ethernet switches connect computers and servers to the LAN. A common Fast Ethernet connection transfers data at about 100 megabits per second. So no matter how fast and effective your company’s servers and Internet connection may be, workers cannot receive data at speeds faster than their Ethernet connection will allow.

In the past, this was rarely a problem. Most employees – even those considered “information workers” – relied on the network primarily to retrieve email and pull files off of local servers. Now, however, many employees place much greater strains on the network in the course of doing their jobs effectively:

• CRM and other applications have shifted employees away from working on their PC’s hard drives. Instead, they are working on applications that are hosted or in the cloud. As a result, employees are continually bombarding the network with data transmissions.
• Commonly used applications are growing richer each year. A few years ago, PowerPoint presentations typically included some colorful backgrounds and text. Today, they may include many large photos, audio files, video files and more.
• Employees are being asked to watch videos for training and conduct video conferences from their cubicles.
• Workers also enjoy non-sanctioned applications that strain network bandwidth. Pandora isn’t a critical business application, but it can slow down network performance nonetheless.

To speed LAN performance, many companies are upgrading their standard Ethernet switches to gigabit Ethernet connections. A gigabit Ethernet switch transmits data at speeds of about 1 gigabit per second – 10 times greater than Fast Ethernet switches.

Fortunately, gigabit switches are growing more affordable for everyone. To get the full benefit of the switch, every component in the network, including computers, needs to be gigabit compliant. Also, keep in mind that upgrading to gigabit switches will not increase the speed of your outside Internet connection. It will only speed up the transmission of data on your LAN.

An example of a high-quality gigabit Ethernet switch is the NetVanta 1600 series by Adtran. This series offers 48 gigabit Ethernet ports, with or without Power over Ethernet (PoE), and two high-speed interface slots, which can accommodate up to four 10-gigabit Ethernet links. This means that users can benefit from up to 80 Gbps between interconnected NetVanta 1638 switches for the most bandwidth-intensive applications.

This article first appeared on Best in UC.

Every business is looking for ways to save a buck these days. For small and mid-sized businesses that haven’t yet made the leap, it may be time to embrace voice over IP (VoIP).

Why abandon your existing phone system? Easy:

• You will save money, not just now but into the future.
• You will simplify future phone maintenance, lowering costs of ownership.
• Your employees will be more productive.

But before you can realize these incredible cost savings and productivity enhancements, you need two things: an IP phone system and a VoIP service provider. Today, we’ll talk about the characteristics of a good VoIP service provider. First, let’s explore the basics of VoIP.

Traditional telephone networks are inherently inefficient. Because they were designed specifically for voice traffic, circuit-switched phone networks require a channel for each individual phone – even when it’s not in use. As a result, the network’s bandwidth is not being well-utilized.

In contrast, VoIP relies on a combined network for both voice and data communications. Internet Protocol (IP) integrates voice traffic into the company’s network, and bandwidth can be managed more effectively.

Some companies now specialize in providing VoIP service specifically for businesses. Choosing the right provider is key, since network problems can lead to poor call quality or – worse – phone network downtime. Before you buy, make sure you learn about the following:

• Quality of service. Businesses need business-class voice quality. This means there should not be disruptions such as jitter or echoes, much less dropped calls. Ensure that voice traffic receives a higher priority than other data on the network.
• Call rates. Here is where the rubber meets the road with VoIP. Shop the various calling plans for the best rates. By choosing the right provider, you can customize your phone service to create major savings. For example, some VoIP calling plans offer free international calls, free calls to certain countries and other money-saving options.
• Scalability. Look for a service provider that can grow with your business, easily adding and removing phone lines without hassles and penalties. Portability may be important for your company as well.
• Toll-free and local phone numbers. A growing number of VoIP providers allow clients to set up custom phone numbers. For example, you might have a local phone number in Chicago that rings your office in Los Angeles. You also need the ability to set up 800 numbers in the future.
• Customer support. Don’t assume that a VoIP provider has reliable customer service that is always available. Make sure there is real-time, 24×7 customer service available from real people. Test them by e-mailing or calling in the middle of the night or at peak business hours.
• Security and backup. It’s critical that your VoIP service provider has built-in redundancy and high-level security. Ask the company to explain its disaster plan.

A high-end video conferencing system seems like an unattainable splurge to many companies. But in reality, the right video solution can dramatically improve communication, training and other expensive functions across your company, creating both cost-savings and better results.

Many of our customers choose LifeSize VideoCenter, touted as the world’s most powerful one-button solution for streaming, recording and auto-publishing. VideoCenter dramatically simplifies the process of recording and distributing video across the enterprise. Because it is simple to use, VideoCenter can be leveraged for a wide range of applications:

• All standard human resources communications can be recorded and made available online. For example, when new employees are hired, they might be directed to a welcome video. Basic training videos that cover corporate policies can be watched from any location. Plus, ongoing HR training for the entire organization can be posted to YouTube, where videos are listed as “private” and made available only to those inside the company.
• Internal training classes can be recorded, with the videos saved for future reference. If a team member missed a session, or was hired after the live training occurred, they can still receive the benefit of the classes by watching the recording at their leisure.
• Company press conferences, announcements and sales meetings can be recorded and distributed across the organization. That way, no matter where an employee’s office is physically located, he or she will still receive the same information as other colleagues.
• When the IT department implements new technologies, the entire organization can be stymied while employees wait for one-on-one training or technical assistance. But what if the IT department used their video conferencing system to record a couple of quick demonstration videos? By making these available across the company, training and support would be minimized.

Of course, all of these applications could be accomplished with a traditional video camera. But VideoCenter has major advantages over a point-and-shoot solution:

• It only takes one person to operate VideoCenter. In contrast, a traditional video camera needs someone operating the camera, in addition to the speaker being recorded. With VideoCenter, the entire session can be easily controlled via the speaker with a remote control.
• With VideoCenter, there is no downloading, uploading or editing required.
• Whether live or on-demand, videos are optimized for every viewer. Whether they are on a PC, laptop, tablet or phone, the viewing device automatically selects the best playback rate based on network conditions. That means no delays or buffering.
• VideoCenter can be set up to automatically publish certain videos, without any further user intervention.

Best of all, VideoCenter and other video conferencing solutions present information in a way that is easily accessed, digested and acted upon by today’s workforce. Video will become more and more common for training, communication, sales meetings, customer presentations and endless other applications. The trick is finding a solution both easy to operate and powerful enough to last.

This article first appeared on Best in UC.

Party in my office. BYOD.

As the workforce grows more technology-savvy, most employees have very strong opinions and preferences about the type of phone, tablet and computer they use to do their jobs. A growing movement is seeing workers BYOD – or “bring your own device” – to the office.

When employees are allowed to use the technologies with which they are already familiar, the company can reap serious benefits. The costs of technology training drop, and productivity improves. Plus, job satisfaction typically rises, and firms can even gain a recruiting advantage over the competition.

Yet there are serious security risks associated with allowing employee devices to access the network. Not to mention the hassles for the IT department, which must support a myriad of devices that may or may not have adequate service plans. With these limitations in mind, does it make sense to pursue a BYOD policy at your company?

There are two strategies gaining traction in the marketplace right now that seem to make sense. In both cases, employees benefit from the satisfaction and improved productivity of working with familiar and preferred devices. At the same time, employers are protected from the networking being bombarded by an endless number of rogue devices.

Consider one of these two options for your organization:

1. BYOD – with conditions. A recent article by CIO Insight beautifully illustrated this strategy. Unisys recognized that employees would fight any policy against using their own devices. So the company rolled out a BYOD policy in North America, allowing employees to bring their own smartphones or tablets to work. The caveat? Employees must agree to installation of two pieces of security software: a public-key infrastructure device certificate (which authenticates the phone on the network) and remote wipe software (to delete company data in the event the phone is lost or stolen). The company is protected, and employees are happy.
2. A menu of supported devices. Under this scenario, employees are given a choice between three or more devices. For example, they may be able to choose between an iPhone, Android device or Blackberry. The same concept can extend to tablets and laptops. At some companies that have begun offering a choice between a PC or Mac, up to half of workers choose a Mac. Under this model, the IT burden remains relatively low. Help desk staff only need to support three kinds of devices, rather than the 10 or more that may be required when employees are given a completely free choice. Also, a limited number of service contracts can cover all of the company’s devices.

No matter your strategy, keep one thing in mind. As technology becomes a more natural, integrated part of consumers’ lives, they will have even stronger desires to control the kinds of devices and technologies they use on the job each day. It’s time to develop some kind of policy now, to get ahead of the BYOD curve.

This article first appeared on Best in UC.

Is theft just a cost of doing business that companies must accept?

We’ve all seen the grainy footage on the news. Robbers hold up a bank or convenience store. Thieves break into a business. But the images are so jumpy, blurry or otherwise incomprehensible, they offer no real clues to the identities of the criminals.

With IP-based security cameras, however, that is all changing. IP cameras are sometimes called network cameras. Rather than transmitting their signals over a traditional cable connection, they send video over a company’s data network.

When an IP security camera records an image, it is initially in analog format. The camera, however, converts it to a digital image. In addition, the camera can use motion detection features to sense a problem, and it can compress video files. After files are compressed, they are sent over the local area network to a PC, where the images are stored.

With an IP system, rather than a traditional cable-based system, users can quickly retrieve video files. The images are clear, and individuals who are captured on film are easily identifiable. Advanced systems even allow for automated face recognition. With this technology, people who are allowed in a particular place at a particular time do not trigger an alarm. An unrecognized individual, however, would be tagged by the system.

Consider this example. A company had very expensive inventory on its premises. Unfortunately, some of that inventory was disappearing. Managers were not interested in a video security system, believing it would not solve the problem. After one too many losses, however, they installed an IP security camera. One night, the video captured a group of perpetrators pulling on ski masks, cutting the fence, going into the yard and stealing items. The security service automatically called the police, who made an arrest while the theft was in progress. So far, nine convictions have been made.

So what does it take to install IP security cameras? If you have an IP network already in place, you’re halfway there. No additional cabling or hardware is needed. Each camera simply needs a port where it can be plugged in. If ports are not already available, they can be easily and inexpensively installed.

With the right choice of IP security cameras, images can be clear and crisp – under all lighting conditions. Motion detectors can make the system call company personnel – or the police directly – when a break-in is detected. Business owners can even watch video remotely, from any computer with an Internet connection. And a small investment in IP cameras can pay off big-time when expensive losses are stopped before they can happen.

It seems like a more efficient use of everyone’s time. But document sharing technologies actually create a host of new challenges in the enterprise, both for users and the network.

The benefits of share-centric systems are clear. Workers can all access a document and make changes to it, ensuring version control and the preservation of changes by various authors. This improves efficiency and makes information ubiquitous throughout the team and the organization.

But at the same time, sharing information can overload a company’s bandwidth – especially at branch offices. In many cases, these satellite facilities are in far-flung locations that may not have access to the super-fast fiber connections that make watching video or downloading large PowerPoint presentations a snap. Rather, branch offices may be accessing their central office’s VPN via a T1 connection.

In recent years, most organizations have pulled back from the practice of maintaining significant IT infrastructure at satellite offices. It simply cost too much to build and maintain the servers at multiple locations. Instead, most companies are finding it more cost-effective and efficient to keep all IT resources in a single location at corporate headquarters. That results in high availability and easy access – as long as your WAN and local data connections can perform.

Just a few years ago, a T1 line provided decent speed for most branch offices. That’s because most of corporate America was relying on the Internet primarily for email. Things have changed dramatically in just the last 12 to 18 months, and as more time passes, bandwidth-intensive web applications will become the norm.

So how’s an organization to deal with this “new normal” of high-bandwidth apps at low-bandwidth satellite offices?

One of our vendors, SonicWALL, has developed a new line of products designed specifically to accelerate performance of the wide-area network, which greatly benefits users in distant geographic locations. The SonicWALL WAN Acceleration Appliance (WXA) solves several of the challenges that file sharing creates. In the simplest terms, SonicWALL dramatically reduces network traffic by transmitting only new or changed data – not entire files.

Imagine a satellite office in a rural location that relies on a T1 line to connect to corporate headquarters. What if five members of the sale team are trying to download a graphics-intensive PowerPoint presentation simultaneously? They could each waste much of the afternoon waiting for the file to complete its journey to their laptop.

That’s why the WAN acceleration appliance actually caches traffic that flows over the WAN. In the above example, the first time that the presentation file is downloaded, it’s cached by the WXA. Then, each subsequent user can quickly and easily retrieve the file – without reaching out over the WAN to the home office.

There are other companies that have created similar devices. The WXA, however, is designed with a couple of twists that make it more effective. First, the WXA sits to the side of the firewall, rather than being in line with the firewall. Why does this matter?

• When competitor products are in-line with the firewall, they are looking at data that has already been compressed and optimized. As a result, data is simply let through without being inspected.
• If there is a problem with a competitor’s in-line device, it slows down the entire WAN or even becomes the equivalent of a cut wire.
• Both of these problems defeat the entire purpose of an acceleration device, which is to optimize data going through the Internet connection and making it take less bandwidth.

The SonicWALL WXA sits off to the side of the firewall. There, it can inspect data before it is optimized. In addition, if it becomes overwhelmed or inoperable, the firewall knows that the WXA has become maxed out and send requests to the VPN without going through the WXA.

The result? Remote users enjoy faster WAN performance with safe, clean files free of security hazards. And that T1 line isn’t such a barrier to work anymore.

This article first appeared on Best in UC.

As a technology services company, our most difficult job may not be what you would expect. It’s not the installation of new products or designing effective solutions. It’s not even finding new customers.

The toughest part of our job is defining what we do. Because eventually, almost all of our potential customers get around to the same question: what – exactly – is unified communications?

Unfortunately, the answer is not a simple one. Unified communications has been defined in many different ways by various companies who sell related products and services. That has made is difficult for everyone in our industry to explain, in a simple manner, what our customers will get when we install a unified communications solution.

It’s time to create a definition that’s easy to understand. Let’s get to it, without too many confusing buzzwords or lofty, meaningless terms.

Unified communications is not a single product or service. That’s what makes it so difficult to explain. Rather, unified communications is the act of bringing together the information you need to do your job effectively. Before I blow your mind with a long list of technologies, let’s talk in terms of practicality.

Consider the average information worker at the average business. On a typical day, this person spends a great deal of time simply managing the inflow of information to various locations. He probably has an overflowing email inbox. On his desk is a phone, upon which the red “you’ve got voicemail” icon is always blinking.

Next to that office phone is another phone – a mobile one. Or perhaps two phones – one for work, and one for home. Each of these has text messages captured in its memory, as well as a separate voicemail box. But wait, there’s more. Perhaps his company encourages the use of instant messages on the computer. Or, he might still have an old-school fax machine, real or virtual. And don’t forget social media, video conferencing, and so much more!

Do you feel overwhelmed by this worker’s communications vehicles? I sure do. And that’s why I encourage companies to embrace unified communications.

With unified communications (UC), you throw out your legacy PBX phone system. In its place, you install a much less-expensive VoIP solution, through which voice and data communications can be consolidated and simplified. E-mail, voicemail and instant messaging are brought together into a single location, making workers more productive. This also create opportunities for mobility, since many UC solutions allow all communications to be accessed by PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

In short, UC streamlines communications by tying together all the disparate parts and making it much easier for everyone to do business. Even if team members work on different kinds of technologies, they can collaborate with one another more effectively.

In addition, UC greatly enhances customer service. Advanced features make it simple for customers to reach out – and receive – the information and help they need. For example, phone calls can “find” and “follow” workers, whether they are in the office or abroad with a mobile phone.

As technologies continue to expand and improve, the functionality of UC will only grow. Right now, UC solutions are being extended to accommodate video conferencing capabilities – both internally in workgroups and externally with customers.

Don’t let the technical-sounding name fool you – or scare you away. Unified communications is as simple as this: saving money, improving efficiency, and creating new and better ways to work.