coip2coip - Collaboration Overview

Instant Messaging and integrated voice communications have become an everyday business and a personal necessity. The demand for Instant Messaging alone has increased dramatically over the past several years and is predicted to become the preferred communication solution over e-mail in the near future.

Within the past year, billions of instant messages were sent each day, and will certainly increase due to the overwhelming popularity of having direct, real-time access to colleagues, friends, and family at the click of a button. Today’s youth already communicate with one another via Instant Messaging using popular applications such as Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and MSN Messenger.

These applications have also emerged in small and enterprise businesses as preferred communication tools as a result of the immediate contact they enable. The use of Instant Messaging in the enterprise is changing the perception of Instant Messaging as an entertainment solution to a real-world business-critical application.

Of course, as Instant Messaging becomes more prevalent in the business community, security remains a primary concern. With the new threat of SPIM (Instant Messaging Spam) and Instant Messaging viruses, IM poses great risks to business organizations. Despite these risks, and alongside the need for a secure, unified communications solution, many other challenges face business users today. Based on surveys and polls taken over the past two years, the most common challenges include the following:

::	Travel
::	Distributed teams and global communication
::	Telecommuting
::	Time-to-market pressures
::	Access to Information and experts
::	Cost Reduction
::	Share information anytime / anywhere

Business users today are under serious pressure to provide even greater efficiency in all of their assigned tasks. With new government sanctions for compliance, reduced labour, and the globalization of the workplace with outsourcing, the ability to access information and expertise, while reducing travel and associated costs is extremely difficult.

Time-to-market pressure has increased with the pressure applied to companies to provide products and results to validate shareholder investments. The corporate landscape has changed as well with reduced travel, increased telecommuting, and geographic disparity with outsourcing and globalization of the workforce.

All of these challenges demand solutions to increase productivity and collaboration, while reducing costs. The Microsoft Unified Communications platform has placed a focus on providing a solution for each of these challenges, leaving time for innovation and ingenuity.

Streamline Communication Connect with the right person, right now and manage information overload.

::	Contact people based on their availability, and then click to communicate with them in the best way: by e-mail, Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP), instant messaging, or audio/video/Web conferencing. Access all communication with a single sign on and single inbox.
::	Connect from within Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Office, and other applications you use every day.
::	Communicate securely while working away from your desk, on the road, or at home with a single, familiar client for the personal computer (PC), Web, and smart devices.
::	Bring people together with audio, video, and Web conferencing to improve team collaboration and to reduce the monetary and environmental costs of travel.

Protection and Control Put IT in control by giving them options to balance and control risk.

::	Manage security, compliance, and archiving policies for messaging and telephony systems with common tools.
::	Eliminate threats before they reach the corporate firewall with built-in security technologies, including real-time antivirus/antispam software and security services for e-mail and instant messaging.
::	Protect critical information and help prevent costly exposure with built-in compliance and encryption.
::	Provide IT control with failover, redundancy, and scalability across your organization.

Increase Operational Flexibility and Reliability Simplify management and maximize resources and budget with increased flexibility for IT operations and administrators.

::	Improve operations with easy, modular, and centralized management tools. Provide professional-grade reliability, availability, and scalability. Provide larger mailboxes at lower cost by enabling organizations to choose their own storage method (for example, storage area networks [SANs], direct attached, or desktop quality discs that do not sacrifice system availability).
::	Consolidate telephony, voicemail, and e-mail systems to dramatically lower maintenance and service costs, particularly for organizations with remote or branch offices.
::	Using Software + Services, determine the best mix of on-premises and cloud-based communications solutions to meet the needs of your users and administrators.

Build on an Unified Communications Platform Extend existing investments and adapt to changing business needs with an extensible platform.

::	Integrate and extend your existing messaging and telephone systems with Microsoft’s software-powered VoIP, which is based on open standards and documented Microsoft protocols.
::	Enhance the end-user experience by embedding Microsoft’s Rich Presence and click-to-call into your applications.
::	Make business processes and workflows more efficient by communications-enabling line of business applications with features such as alerts and notifications, query/response bots, and interactive voice response (IVR) self-service.

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Virtual Office	Solutions	Hardware

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Collaboration Overview