• UC guru Dave Michels says MS Lync does to unified communications what Outlook did to email in the 1990s. Outlook and Exchange were among the first mainstream solutions that combined email, calendaring and contacts into a single integrated application. Microsoft’s aim with Lync is to unify communications tools. What were the four most-significant improvements to the Microsoft Lync 2010 release? Michels highlights them in this Microsoft Lync article.
• Our very own Networking Media Group Director at TechTarget, Kate Gerwig, explains how Microsoft Lync disrupts the unified communications market this way: “If the future of UC is a set of features to integrate into other applications, who’s better positioned to do that than Microsoft — with its great developer environment and desktop mindshare?”
• TechTarget’s Microsoft Lync adoption survey found that — even though Lync is in it’s infancy, the product is off to a running start.  The 329 international voice and network professionals who responded to the survey cited compelling motivators for deploying Lync, as well as Lync issues.  

Are you left wondering whether Microsoft Lync is all  its cracked up to be? Leave us a comment and let us know whether you think the MS Lync fever is hype or ripe.

With this savvy advice, the editors of SearchUnifiedCommunications.com asked Lazar to create an IT Decision Center guide to walk IT professionals through the steps of a typical RFP buying process to help our members find a business collaboration solution. In the guide, you will learn the answers to these questions:

• What are the benefits of business collaboration?
• What business collaboration architectures are there and which meet my needs?
• What questions do I need to ask my potential collaboration vendor?
• How do I seal the deal with my collaboration vendor?

If you’re left with any questions along the way, feel free to reach out to our UC expert panelists by emailing editor@serachunifiedcommunications.com.

With backup in the form of talking to hundreds of enterprises about UCC each year, Lazar makes a good point. UCC technology in a vacuum may be cool and new, but it can cost you big money and present lots of bad surprises in terms of who’s not using it and why. He urges that instead of looking at the technology, the UC question of choice should be how to help employees do their jobs. The major measure of UC success is how often employees use the capabilities available to them.

One of the problems that UCC brings with it is that the more ways enterprises have to collaborate, the more confusing the options have become. Despite social business tools and desktop video deployments, most employees rely on email first and foremost, Lazar says.

According to Lazar, communication of the most basic kind will guarantee greater UC success, with people inside the business talking to other people inside the business. Creating a Business Technology Liaison (BTL, not to be confused with a BLT) team is a critical success factor when designing a UC deployment that has a chance of working, he says. BTLs are preferably designated employees with IT backgrounds who are charged with explaining and socializing the UC effort to the business side of the house and finding out who really wants to use what. BTLs also need to ensure that employees in all business units are aware of new UC rollouts and know how to use them.

Recent Nemertes surveys show that 81% of companies have someone in a BTL role, even if they don’t call it that, and 63% of those BTLs have IT backgrounds, according to recent Nemertes data.

“Depending on the size of the company, one is usually not enough,” Lazar said, adding that enterprises planning UCC deployments have at least one BTL per business unit in place for the rollout and keep the team in place over time to deal with issues as they come up.

No matter how the BTLs connect — video conference, webcast, social media or actual telephone — they almost guarantee better adoption and use of UC technology. The use of social tools, for example, is exploding, but often outside of ITs’ knowledge within different business units. Lazar maintains that BTLs have a key role to play and are a must-have for any UC roadmap so business units from legal to HR to IT itself know what collaboration apps are available so the left hand can talk to the right.