Communication is generally meant to break down barriers that may exist between individuals. People can communicate through different devices such as personal computers, wireless phones, thin clients and personal digital assistants among other devices. Unified communications is therefore an industry term that is used to describe all forms of call, cross-media, or multimedia message management functions that are controlled by a given user for both social and business reasons.
These include any transactional or informational application processes that emulate human users and use a single, mailbox for contact access. The main purpose of unified communications is to break down barriers so that people are able to use different modes of communication, different devices as well as different media to communicate with others that may be located anywhere and at any time that they may wish to do so.
Unified communications makes use of many communication models or systems including:
- Unified messaging – this is great for your business as it allows users to access fax, email, voice as well as other mixed media from a single mailbox irrespective of the access device they are using
- Multimedia services – these include messages of mixed media types like pictures, sound clips and videos. They also include communication that is done through short message services also referred to as (SMS)
- Collaboration and interaction systems –they involve applications like scheduling, workflow, calendaring, integrated voice response as well as other enterprise applications that generally help workgroups and individuals to communicate effectively
- Real-time as well as near real-time communication systems – they focus on how people communicate with each other using applications or systems like instant messaging, conferencing, traditional private branch exchanges as well as paging
- Transactional and informational systems – they focus on the provision of access to e-commerce, m-commerce, weather, voice web-browsing as well as other enterprise applications
Unified communications comes with great benefits for your business and can result in more efficiency from company executives, improved collaboration as well as improved productivity. It optimizes business processes in addition to enhancing human communications by managing flows, reducing latency and eliminating media and device dependencies and is therefore a great addition to your business.
