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Rss FeedIn this paper, discover the positive impact of Unified Communications on both day-to-day interactions as well as on higher level goals such as business process efficiency, customer loyalty and profitability. Explore the communications dilemmas faced by workers, management, technology teams, and organizations as a whole. Learn specific proven strategies for using Unified Communications to address these challenges, and gain useful insights for evaluating and building a compelling business case for Unified Communications in your organization.
Riverbed positioned in Leaders quadrant of 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers. In this report, Gartner helps organizations interested in WAN Optimization Controller capabilities truly understand their options.
Both private and public sector organizations need their network to be as secure as possible because the attacks are coming from all sides. Managing user identity enables organizations to know who attempts to get onto the network and access resources, when they are on, what they are doing, and where they have been on the network, not to mention where they can go on the network. In this webcast, we discuss how secure identity management cost-effectively delivers granular network protection, increases user productivity, satisfies regulatory compliance and decreases cost for IT organizations.
Here are five questions for enterprise network managers to bear in mind when considering UC deployment:
1. What applications need to be unified communications-enabled?
Many enterprise IT organizations divide responsibility for networking and applications into two groups. Unified communications requires both application and network infrastructure support, so that means getting both groups on board before deployment. Enabling unified communications support may involve a little or a lot of work, depending on the application. For some messaging and VoIP applications, presence support may already be built-in.
Other applications – such as databases, CRM packages and especially custom-developed transaction-processing programs – may lack presence support altogether. Identifying which applications will need unified communications support, and getting the appropriate development help if needed, is a necessary first step.
2. What existing network infrastructure supports unified communications?
Passing along presence information in a unified communications-enabled network usually means supporting new protocols and/or adding infrastructure services. With location-based unified communications services, for example, DNS servers may need to be updated with SRV (service type) and LOC (location) records. Other infrastructure services, such as those for e-mail and instant messaging, may need to be extended. Presence information (for example, to move availability status between voice and instant-messaging systems) can be added via SIMPLE or XMPP.
Security is always a concern whenever adding new pathways through the network. Most unified communications systems can use centralized directory servers such as those based on Lightweight Directory Access Protocol or Microsoft Active Directory to authenticate users or processes seeking to communicate. And firewalls and other security devices will need to be reconfigured to support new messaging protocols – not just SIMPLE and XMPP but also any proprietary messaging protocols such as those used by AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and the like.
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