Unified Communications Hosting and Consulting Blog

Unified Communications Meets 4G Wireless Broadband

 

If you work remotely as much as I do, one of your areas of frustration is probably the situation where you are at a customer's location and need Internet access. Many companies provide guest WiFi but most do not. Wired networks may have firewall settings that stymie connection attempts. Thus, demonstrating software solutions is often reduced to PowerPoint slides rather than demonstrating the live system. In my case, a live demonstration of our hosted business applications platform is the most powerful way to show real-life performance and user experience.

Smartphones like the iPhone are great for consuming content but not really suitable for creating content or doing demonstrations. While I use my iPhone to show integration with our unified communications solution it does not work for software demos. Also, the existing 3G networks are too slow for showing any meaningful near real-time applications.

So I was delighted to find that Comcast is providing a 4G networks across the greater Seattle area, based on the WiMax standard. While Comcast sells the service, it is provided by ClearWire Communications in which Comcast has a significant capital investment. Coverage is limited in much of the country, however network rollouts are continuing. Visit http://www.comcast.com/highspeed2go/#/coverage for the current coverage map.

So how does it work? You subscribe to a plan for a minimum of 12 months. As I work principally in Seattle I chose the Metro2Go plan which costs $30/month plus $49 activation fee. National roaming is available at additional cost. The system falls back to 3G when 4G coverage is unavailable while roaming.

 

 

 

Comcast shipped me a USB device which is about the size of a USB thumb drive. Install the communications software, plug in the USB device and you are live. I have run connection speed tests and the typical speed recorded is 10Mb download, 1Mb upload. This is comparable to DSL speeds.

To determine coverage I placed my laptop on the passenger seat of my car and established an audio connection to one of my colleagues using Office Communicator running on our OCS platform. With a wireless headset I was able to maintain a constant phone conversation at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour. I found 2 dead spots on my 9 mile commute, similar to dead spots you find with cell phones.

So far I am absolutely delighted. I have attended several customer sales meetings on their site and so far found only one office where I could not get signal. Phone calls made over the connection are free saving me cell phone minutes. The speed of my laptop is the same or better when compared to being on a WiFi network at the office or at home.

I can imagine that 4G services will be a boon to mobile workers in sales, construction, real estate and many other professions and industries.

True location transparency is here.

 

Hosted Unified Communications: a.k.a. I Just Want a Box in the Sky

This is, word for word, what a customer recently shared with our team.

Stripping away industry hype, what most end-customers are looking for are business solutions.

Most likely that solution is business hosting of applications, communications and other services, and the smaller the company, that solution becomes increasingly more appealing. It is difficult for a small business to invest resources-in terms of headcount and capital-into technology, which paradoxically is essential for the business to prosper.

Often the idea of "outsourcing" is thought of as solely the province of large companies. However, businesses in the US with fewer than 100 employees actually employ almost 40 million people in the United States. These enterprises today have access to business hosted applications and services that are equivalent to the tools the largest companies are using: email, customer relationship management, accounting, project management, collaboration and many others.

Save on Capital Costs

Business hosted solutions are based on a subscription business model that does away with up-front capital outlays, the need for internal IT expertise, and continual upgrades. Customers pay for exactly what they consume each month, particularly useful for businesses having significant seasonal fluctuations in employee or contractor numbers.

Collaborate

Sharing of information between employees as well as external parties is critical. Business-hosted applications like Exchange email, SharePoint and Office Communicator provide the means to share documents, calendars and other collateral. They allow you to hold an impromptu meeting with voice and video while avoiding the cost of conference calls or travel. It's possible, today, to add a complete unified communications (UC) solution that fully integrates business applications and telephone and includes a very competitive calling plan.

Work From Anywhere

Business hosted applications allow for true location transparency, since you can work from anywhere with an Internet connection. Similarly, you can connect with your cell phone or other device. With workforces moving to telecommuting and an increasing number of professionals rarely coming to the office, hosted applications provide the same user experience-regardless of where you are. No need to establish virtual private network (VPN) connections, since all data is encrypted by default.

The bottom line

Finally, small and mid-sized businesses can avail themselves of technology that reduces costs and increases productivity, at less than the cost of the average cell phone bill.

Tell us what you think

How will Unified Communications drive your business? What are your expectations? 

Are You Sitting on a Training Content Goldmine?

Recycling is for more than plastic and cans. Not using the documentation that is hiding somewhere in your organization is wasteful, and conservation is really trendy right now.

The raw material is already there 

You have training you need to develop and you know, somewhere in the recesses of your organization, there has to be material you can leverage for it. But, you have no idea where to find it. Many people end up reinventing the wheel for the same result, costing organizations time and money.

There are plenty of content management systems out there that will gather content and organize it. But, how does it know the audience, their location, the right delivery for the right student?

The key is to put a trained eye to the stack of training documentation, product specifications, whitepapers, presentations, graphics and Help files to put all the puzzle pieces together.

The Content Architect Process from implement.com

Here's a process we've used that has helped many training organizations get solid training plans together, keep costs in check and keep the training team from pulling their hair out.

There is a special hybrid of training and technical writer out there that I call "Content Architects". These people have an uncanny talent. They are able to walk into a business they have little specific background in and go through a series of discovery steps.

They know how to glean the information they need in order to organize content and provide direction on any gaps. These are special people who tend to have a lot of interesting facts to share at cocktail parties too.

I've been lucky enough to work quite a bit with these folks over the years and have found they are invaluable to clients in need of a true content partnership. They are that missing piece, the trained eye, that can truly help bring your content library into focus.

What we have done for many of our clients involves a few simple steps:

• Discovery. Depending upon the client, this can be as simple as a series of interviews and access to the storeroom. This is that important "getting to know you and your business" piece that gets us the global view of what is important to you, your students and your boss. It helps guide us to the end goal or objective.
• Viability. Identify if the proposed training addresses a current pain point in your organization or if there are career objectives for the student. Does your existing content meet these needs?
• Definition. Which elements of the proposed training work and which do not? Is an instructor-led, classroom training the best route? Or, is a self-paced environment more in line with what your students need? Are there gaps in your library that need to be filled or are updates necessary?
• Plan of Action. The final step pulls all these pieces together, creating a useful design document and a solid curriculum plan.

At the end you not only have a clear, organized curriculum plan in place, but an exceptional writer who can deliver the polished product who understands your business from the 400-foot-level...oh, and a great addition to any cocktail party.

Let's hear from you. What content is locked up in your organization, just waiting to be found, designed and built into a Valuable Training Content System?

Add a comment or ask a question using the comments feature below.

Implement Accepted into Exchange 2010’s Prestigious Technology Adoption Program

At implement.com, we realize that your clients are under pressure to innovate in response to an ever-changing IT landscape. That's why we're excited to announce our acceptance into the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for Microsoft Exchange 2010.

The TAP was created to evaluate the partner and multi-tenant hosting capabilities of Microsoft's new product version so the company can (1) get early product feedback and (2) ensure that its features are fully capable of managing real-world scenarios.

So, why is this important to implement.com clients? It's great news, for several reasons.

• Since deploying Exchange 2010 RTM is not supported in a hosting scenario, we want to be ready to deploy Exchange 2010 in a fully supported scenario-so our clients can be comfortable with our hosting solutions.
• Due to our unwavering customer commitment and our dedication to solidifying an already-productive relationship with Microsoft, we were one of only a few companies chosen for the TAP program.
• Because of our affiliation with Microsoft and our opportunity to be among the first providing Hosted Exchange 2010 in a supported environment, implement.com remains at the forefront of the hosting world. That's good news for us-and great news for our clients.

The TAP program is widely recognized within the IT sector, which is just another reason why the implement.com team is excited about working closely with Microsoft.

Not only will we get a hands-on preview of Hosted Exchange 2010's revolutionary features-but we'll also be able to assist our clients in benefitting from its strategic business implications.

TRAINING, CERTIFICATION AND MICROSOFT PARTNER COMPETENCIES

I will confess at the outset that I am a firm believer in life-long learning ... not just formal or professional education for job-related reasons, but also for continual personal growth. Piano lessons or cooking classes are valid ways to pursue that goal.

In the IT industry there are many views about the value of partner certifications like Microsoft or Cisco. Some pundits observe that certificates mean little without practical experience or "street smarts." I tend to agree with this view - it would be a stretch to send someone who takes a 3-week boot camp and earns the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer credential to design a Windows network for a multi-national company with 50,000 users!

Conversely though, highly experienced engineers tend to work on small subsets of product features that are most relevant to architecture and deployment. This is analogous to how the hundreds of millions of people who use Microsoft Office probably know and use only 5% of the capabilities of the software, although in the case of senior engineers this percentage is probably more like 50%. Certification exams push IT professionals out of their comfort zone by forcing them to learn all aspects of the product. So I would argue that the combination of formal learning and practical experience is the ideal scenario. And mind you, training is an ongoing process that typically requires re-certification every three years to match typical product cycles.

It is interesting that many people believe the fallacy that certification tests are easy, and someone who has used the product for years can just walk in and pass the exam. This is simply not true. Typically, an individual with a reasonable product background needs to invest 20-30 hours of time learning the material to pass a 90-minute test. So companies that employ certified professionals are really demonstrating in a very tangible way their willingness to invest in their people.

When I worked at Microsoft, an internal analysis found a strong positive correlation between employee certification status and customer satisfaction scores. This result was not just confined to Microsoft products, but included ITIL certification for operations and security credentials like CISSP.

So, I would conclude that training and certification is a smart investment for good business reasons.

Microsoft's Partner Program requires partners to earn ‘competencies' in particular technology and business areas. Each competency requires a combination of Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCPs) on staff, and relevant customer references.  While no system is perfect, partner competencies provide a yardstick that shows a Gold Certified Partner has delivered verifiable business solutions to customers, and has invested in its workforce by attaining required technical certification status.

Here at Implement.com, we hold several Microsoft Partner competencies. We've most recently attained the Microsoft Business Solutions competency focusing on Dynamics CRM 4.0. Our company has a commitment to maintaining engineer certifications by assigning time for study, paying for testing, and programmatically tracking results to plan.

Unified Communications: Debunking Common Myths about Cloud Computing and Business Hosting

As a small-to-midsized business (SMB) innovator, you're increasingly concerned with your company's resource outlay. You may have embraced managed hosting, but your IT staff is still juggling the logistics of real-time communication services like e-mail, SMS, MMS, RSS, IM, social media, web conferencing, CRM, and call management along with applications like CRM and document collaboration portals.

 

As SMB decision makers evaluate their bottom line, many are discovering that managing IT complexity internally is devouring time, resources and money they can't feasibly spare. Read on to find out why deploying applications internally may be an unnecessary distraction for your business - and why you need a next-generation, business class provider of hosted communications and applications.

 

Out with the Old

 

Historically speaking, communications and applications have been mission-critical functions for SMBs. Because of this, it has made sense to keep its management "in the family." Concerns about information security, crisis administration and cost effectiveness prevented many businesses from pursuing managed services for communications and application platforms. Times have changed, though, and many SMB innovators are finding that the right  solution can save them money-and accelerate their path to success.

 

In with the New

 

Today's buzz word is Cloud Computing but what we are talking about here is Business Hosting. The cloud computing available today is closely aligned with outsourcing custom applications to a hosted provider, and being able to very quickly leverage additional computing capacity for running applications that includes servers (usually virtualized), applications services (hosting the app), database services, and storage. When we talk about business hosting we are referring to the communications and applications mentioned above like email, voice, and instant messaging. These aren't the apps you get from cloud computing vendor, these are available from companies providing business hosting.

 

 

If you're caught in the great outsourcing debate and trying to learn how cloud and/or business hosting can provide solutions, we urge you to ask yourself these questions:

 

1. Is the management of internal IT interfering with the pursuit of my core business objectives?
2. How old is the technology I'm depending on to run my business? Does the thought of upgrading it make you apprehensive?
3. Is my staff regularly distracted by routine communications tasks?
4. How much am I paying for individual communications solutions like web-conferencing, e-mail, IM, PBX etc? How much for business applications like CRM?
5. How could a fully-integrated, unified communications platform simplify the administration of my company's email, calendar, IM, CRM, blogging and hosting functions?
6. Does my staff have the necessary expertise and resources to support our company's growth requirements in the current market?

At implement, we realize that your time, manpower and financial resources are valuable-and limited. That's why we think you'll appreciate our simplified, integrated alternative to piecemeal communications and applications. It's time to refocus your energy. Give us a call today for a personalized, unified communications and business applications consultation-and discover why you can't afford to be in the business of hosting these apps on your own.

Over the next several blogs, we'll be debunking a variety of internal Business Hosting myths, including the following: 

• Communications and applications are foundational to our company, and therefore they're just too important to outsource.
• By outsourcing any of my company'scommunications platforms, I'm surrendering control of those functions.
• Money is tight. I just can't afford to outsource communications and applications to a business hosting provider.
• Only large firms outsource their communications and applications. We're not big enough to worry about it.
  

So, what about you: Do you need Cloud Computing yet, or are you more concerned about leveraging business hosting for Hosted IT and Communication Services? We'd like to hear your thoughts.