* Pinning down problems is the hardest part of unifying communications
We recently discussed the importance of a unified communications portal, but two pieces of the puzzle are missing, and we can’t seem to find them despite discussions with multiple vendors. Those missing pieces are a converged management approach and a converged security approach.
Imagine, for example, that you’re a unified communications portal user and you receive a visual voicemail icon on your screen. You click to listen, and discover the voice mail is garbled. So, you click on the sender’s icon to return the voicemail message with a real-time phone call to find out what the sender said – but you get a recording, “We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed.” So now you’ve got a garbled message and you can’t even make an outgoing call to the sender.
Who are you as a user going to blame? Most likely you’re going to point the finger at whichever supplier’s company logo appears on the portal window.
Suppose you then call your IT department. The IT department now has to decipher the problem. They must check to see if the unified communications portal is to blame, and/or if the audio application that encoded the message is at fault, and/or if the server or server operating system is at fault, and/or if the transmission equipment provided you with bad sound, and/or if the phone network failed to provide the information needed by the voicemail system or portal to properly store the message and caller ID, and/or (insert you own likely problem here).
Anyway, you get the idea.
To make matters worse, the poor customer service rep in IT probably specializes in either networks or applications – but not both. Based on our experience, the gulf between the applications world and the network world is even wider than the gulf between voice network experts and data network experts.
So what’s the poor user to do? How’s the poor IT department going to handle this? Just wait until the next newsletter – it gets worse.
