Mike Stacy's Blog

UC: A Perspective on Best Practices

This week I was asked to present a quick segment to a group of about 50 customers and partners, the topic being “Best Practices,” without much definition or context.  The majority of the customer participants were CIO/CTO or other senior decision-making managers, so a presentation on technical best practices was definitely out of the question.  On top of that I only had about 30 minutes, so my goal was to present concepts to help these customers as they moved along the path of making decisions about their unified communications goals.

With that context, I thought I’d share the material that I presented in case others find it informative.  There’s not a ton to it in terms of text content – it’s really meant to spur thoughts and conversation, which it definitely did.  If I had a longer time slot I would definitely expand on a number of these areas and add dedicated sections to explore concepts like voice and video in more depth.

Planning for Unified Communications – A Perspective on Best Practices

© Mike Stacy 2010, All Rights Reserved

 

Define the Vision

UC has the capability to encompass or integrate with virtually every aspect of your user’s daily experience – plan for it

• Understand the business value of a complete, long term solution and identify that as the target state
• Plan for the unknown – some capabilities/integration points with significant ROI may not exist today or will be easier/cheaper in the future
• Break the target state down into smaller projects and manage appropriately
• Be aware of the potential impact on the IT organization – changes may be in order as part of the project plan

 

User Experience is King

The most beneficial result of a successful UC deployment is the increase in collaboration as a result of new user behavior

• Understand the impacts to users’ workflows, desktop experience, etc. as each aspect of a UC strategy is deployed
• Involve “champion” users in the pilot and feedback groups so that their inherent nature to positively promote flows throughout the organization
• Train appropriately using familiar business situations in the process to solidify the experience and kick-start usage (this may mean training in a departmental manner with some customization of training material)

 

Network Considerations

Plan for the network impact of the desired usage, not necessarily the expected usage

• IT organizations often have a pessimistic view of user adoption, educate the organization’s non-IT leadership and let them define the desired usage
• Users often adopt UC features virally, even without formal training
• If there is not adequate bandwidth for a feature, ensure that it can be disabled until the bandwidth becomes available
• Consider impacts to both wired and wireless networks
• Remember the impact of latency on real-time communications and ensure that application architecture, network design, and usage patterns are collectively considered

 

On-premise or Hosted?

For good reason, hosted/cloud services are a major area of focus right now, but they aren’t yet right for everyone

• Primary trade-off of moving to cloud services is the reduction in flexibility/feature set
• Evaluate the importance of extended integration (i.e. integration with LOB apps, existing infrastructure, etc.) versus generic services such as instant messaging and web conferencing
• Complete voice and video offerings are still a challenge for cloud providers due to regulatory and bandwidth concerns
• B2B and B2C options are often severely limited or not available when leveraging cloud offerings

The Unified Communications Community on Twitter

Like many techies out there, I’m usually very quick to sign up for new services/web sites/tools/etc. if even for no other reason that to see what it is and how it works.  For me, Twitter was no exception.  When it first debuted I signed up for an account and, shortly after, summarily decided that it was worthless to me.  This is quite different than my viewpoint on technologies like blogs, wikis and other now-commonplace tools that we all use with great benefit today.  I simply thought that I was not in the target demographic for Twitter – I wasn’t going to post my random thoughts on any sort of consistent basis and even if I did, the only people that might care weren’t really the type who would be so connected as to benefit from this method of communication.

However, a few weeks ago I a search result I received was linked to a Twitter post, and furthermore I knew the person who had posted it.  A quick look at his Twitter page indicated an active discussion on topics that are near and dear to my heart, namely Unified Communications.  This put me on a bit of a mission to see how many people in the community were using Twitter and what information was being communicated.  I looked at the active topics and followed links to those users’ pages for an hour or so, more out of interest in the topics than anything else.  Based on this I decided that I was missing out and needed to join in.  It’s impractical to use Twitter via a web browser for more than a few tasks (too many clicks, searches, etc.) so I immediately downloaded TweetDeck, which allows you to have search columns that act similar to RSS feeds.  It also includes columns that show your direct messages and mentions.

I quickly added search columns for #ocs and #ucoms and right away I had great views of all the discussions on these topics, complete with toast-style notifications of updates.  Tweets on these hashtags include (but are not limited to) things like Q&As, rants about an issue, press releases, and companies/recruiters looking to hire.

Like anything, the system is not without its downsides.  Using a nice tool like TweetDeck makes ReTweeting annoying since all the RTs contain the same hashtags as the original Tweet.  Also, a limitation specific to TweetDeck is that there is no quick option off the taskbar icon to suspend the toast notifications.  I do a lot of presenting so this means I have to either so modify the application settings or exit the app altogether every time I present.  I usually end up exiting since it’s fastest and I have a tendency to forget until I get the first toast during the presentation.  Respecting that the system is in a full screen presentation and automatically modifying the behavior of the app would be ideal, but the quick menu option would be a step in the right direction.

I’m still not the type of person who is particularly fond of (or thinks other people have an interest in) posting my random thoughts, so I’m more of a lurker than anything else.  Even so, I enjoy the steady stream of data complete with plenty of bit.ly links if something of interest pops up.  If you haven’t checked out Twitter recently for use in a business context then I would recommend revisiting it.

Quarterly UC Virtual User Group meeting tomorrow

This is a reminder that the Microsoft Unified Communications Virtual User Group will be holding it's last quarterly meeting of 2009 tomorrow at 2:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT). We've had a great year getting UCVUG off the ground and look forward to ending the year with an awesome presentation by Chris Norman from Microsoft. Chris will be presenting on Response Groups in OCS 2007 R2.  You can register for the event at http://ucvugdec2009.eventbrite.com/.  The Live Meeting link is also posted on the UCVUG website.

We will also be testing our new chat room on the UCVUG website prior to the meeting. Just logon to http://www.ucvug.org at 1:30 PM Eastern (-5 GMT) and click on the "Chat" tab to join us for a "meet and greet" chat session.

Thanks again for your continued support of UCVUG and we look forward to seeing you at the meeting tomorrow!

UC Virtual User Group Kickoff

I’m excited to let everyone know about the kickoff meeting of the UC Virtual User Group (UCVUG), coming up on May 21st at 7pm Eastern time.  There will be some great content and even some giveaways!  Many thanks to fellow MVP Dustin Hannifin for organizing the group/event.  I’ll be presenting our SmartSIP solution, which will hit RTM on May 20, and another fellow MVP, Jeff Schertz, will will be presenting on new features in OCS 2007 R2.

The UCVUG website is http://ucvug.org/ or you can jump straight to the registration page at http://ucvuglaunch.eventbrite.com/.

Hope to see you there!

Entrust UC Certificates

I’ve favorably referenced the UC certs from Entrust a few times over on the OCS Forums and I noticed recently that they’ve had a pretty significant price drop.  They used to be priced at $1099 for 2 years but are now available in 1, 2, 3, and 4 year versions, all of which have been reduced in price.  Definitely worth a look if you are doing an OCS installation or getting ready to renew your certificates.

Microsoft actually worked with the certificate providers when they created the UC Cert program, which includes other providers as well (check the link for the current list).  Any time I’m working with a customer on an Edge deployment I use these certificates – they are simple to obtain, well priced, and can be easily reissued if your names change.