Aug 31 2008 8:41PM GMT
Posted by: Tony Bradley
SQL query,
Mike Stacey,
Evangelyze Communications,
Microsoft,
OCS 2007,
Unified Communications,
UC
For capacity and scaling purposes, there may come a time when you need to determine how many users are connecting to a given OCS front end. As Mike Stacey of Evangelyze Communications points out in his blog, there is no inherent feature or function in OCS 2007 that provides this type of information. With a little resourceful ingenuity between Mike and Evangelyze Communications co-worker Simon Booth, they managed to come up with a solution to gather the information they needed though. To learn more, take a look at Mike’s blog post SQL Query to return number of users per Front End.
Aug 29 2008 1:40PM GMT
Posted by: Tony Bradley
ROI,
user,
education,
training,
Evangelyze Communications,
corporate culture,
Unified Communications,
UC
Unified Communications is many things to many people. Many organizations (and even some experts) are still struggling to define what it is, what it isn’t, what are the features and benefits, and what are the pitfalls. Arguments can be made about how it will streamline communications and allow the company to be more productive and more efficient, but that assumes it is properly implemented and used. Where the proverbial ‘rubber meets the road’, the true measure of ROI for the UC investment will be based in large part on how well the company educates its users and transforms the corporate culture so that the users understand how to leverage the new tools effectively. Investing in a unified communications infrastructure without training the employees to use it effectively is like having a race car that nobody knows how to drive. Evangelyze Communications, a Microsoft Gold Partner and Voice Premier Partner, understands this need and has developed an end-user training course organizations can use to educate their users and transform the communicatios culture to make sure employees take advantage of the UC tools at their disposal.
Aug 25 2008 3:42AM GMT
Posted by: Tony Bradley
instant messaging,
Office Communicator,
Evangelyze Communications,
Web 2.0,
click-to-chat,
click-to-call,
ICP,
Interactive Communications Platform,
Nortel
One of the next big frontiers for Unified Communications is integrating UC functionality into call centers or customer support departments. Granted, most organizations are still struggling to manage the original frontier of how to deploy UC in the first place and realize the values and benefits it delivers. But, the ability to leverage those same benefits and increased efficiency can really translate to ROI when you are talking about how hundreds or thousands of calls are routed for customer support centers. Nortel has introduced their Interactive Communications Platform, or ICP, which provides Web 2.0 style widgets that companies can incorporate into their web sites which will provide customers with the ability to initiate instant messaging sessions with company representatives, or use a click to call function which will automatically initiate a call back from the customer support center to the customer. Evangelyze Communications has also developed a click to chat utility that links with the Office Communicator instant messaging functionality to allow customers to chat in real-time with Evangelyze Communications representatives and get answers to their questions.
Aug 23 2008 1:19PM GMT
Posted by: Tony Bradley
Mike Stacey,
Evangelyze Communications,
Director,
Mediation,
Edge,
OCS 2007,
Unified Communications,
UC,
Microsoft
Those familiar with Microsoft Unified Communications and how to deploy and configure Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 are likely familiar with the Edge and Mediation roles. The OCS Edge server allows external or public access to the OCS 2007 resources, and the Mediation server ‘mediates’ between communications protocols, allowing the Microsoft Unified Communications platform to integrate and communicate with other voice protocols. A slightly more obscure role is that of the Director. As Mike Stacey, Director of Services for Evangelyze Communications, points out in his blog, it is not a completely separate installation, like the Edge and Mediation roles, but it can play a valuable role in your Microsoft Unified Communications infrastructure. Check out Mike’s blog post (The OCS Director - Reasons, Benefits and Dependencies) to learn more.
Jun 30 2008 2:42PM GMT
Posted by: Tony Bradley
LDAP,
filter,
contacts,
Active Directory,
UC,
Unified Communications,
OCS 2007,
Mike Stacy,
EC,
Evangelyze Communications
For most organizations, the fact that OCS 2007 can pull the contacts from Active Director is not a problem. However, situations can arise in larger companies with separate subsidiaries where one group is deploying OCS and another isn’t, or where multiple organizations within the company are deploying OCS, but they don’t want to share contacts in OCS. There is no truly elegant solution, but there are rudimentary options available to enable this sort of filtering. Evangelyze Communications Voice Program Services Director Mike Stacy explains how to do it on his blog site.
