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By Natasha Lomas, 19 November 2009 16:17

NEWS

A unified communications project is all too often a daunting prospect for a CIO.

UC is a broad topic - and a deployment can bring with it both unexpected benefits and unforeseen pitfalls.

For those thinking of embarking on a rollout, silicon.com quizzed CIOs and IT chiefs who have already deployed UC systems about their experiences, and the issues those following in their footsteps should prepare for.

Dan Hidlebaugh, director of network services at Hertford Regional College has deployed fixed mobile convergence (FMC) using technology from Agito Networks.

Perks
According to Hidlebaugh, the organisation really didn't have any surprises other than the clarity of the calls. "We were expecting there to be a drop-off in clarity on signal and nothing like that happened. In fact we find that the Agito calls are, in most cases, clearer than our straight mobility ones were."

Hidlebaugh added he has received "great feedback from heads of department" on the added functionality that UC brings, including click to call. "Little perks that make senior management teams a lot happier," he said.

Perils
Apart from a routing issue that occurred when the system was used at home which meant one side of conversation could not be heard - solved in an afternoon - Hidlebaugh said "We really didn't experience any severe issues".

"We planned this out pretty carefully. We talked to Agito beforehand and got a really good layout technically - so when it actually came time to do it, the prep was done and it was a matter of an afternoon and all our stuff was up and running. We didn't have a long teething period, we didn't have a great number of issues."

Alan Kirkham, service director for corporate ICT at Wakefield Council is currently in the process of migrating to Siemens OpenScape Unified Communications. He will then be looking at integrating Office Communicator with IP telephony, and converging with mobile telephony.

Perks
According to Kirkham, "the biggest benefit as a manager has been presence".

"Just knowing someone's sat at a computer somewhere is one of the real big pluses as far as both myself and as managers are concerned," he added.

The council has also federated presence with third parties such as consultants and Microsoft itself, helping to cut down telephone tag and delays in responding to emails.

"You know the number of times you make a phone call they might not be there, you send an email they might not get it or read it for a while - presence just takes all that out of the window. It gives you far more effective and productive communications."

Perils
"The biggest challenge at the moment is migrating away from the existing telephony solution in terms of porting the numbers and making sure that we have a painless migration that doesn't disrupt telephony services to employees," Kirkham said.

(Photo credit: kozumel via Flickr.com under the following Creative Commons Licence)

Nick Scott, IT director for NB Real Estate has recently linked the company's phone system, which is managed by Colt, with Microsoft Communicator Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007.

Perks
According to Scott, some sections of the company have been quicker to take up the system than expected.

"We thought with the older [staff] we'd have quite a slow take-up in how it's used but in actual fact we've had quite a fast take-up," he said, thanks to the simple way the UC functionality is integrated with the phone system.

Staff are also picking up how to use features without any prior experience. "We've had the odd occasion where people have gone into Outlook and call-forwarded their own phones to their mobiles without any training or anybody telling them, explaining to them what to do. So I think it's quite intuitive, much more intuitive than I first thought it'd be."

Perils
According to Scott, there were some initial technical issues when the rollout was started. "[Colt's] end worked first time but our Microsoft Communicator end took a couple of reinstalls to get it to do what it was supposed to do," he said.

"It didn't work first time needless to say but since it has been up and running we've had zero issues. It's been really reliable."

Scott also highlighted the issue of "the lack of general knowledge about unified communications". "There's not an awful lot of people who know about it really," he said. "You get telephone people come from it from a telephone end and data people come from it from a data end and it's more of a data product. There's a little bit of a gap there but I don't think that's really going to be an issue for long."