Unified Communications: Finding the Right Expert

To a moderately knowledgeable IT manager, deploying unified communications (UC) can be a lot like asking for directions in a familiar town.

You know where you’re going and you know how to drive—how demeaning to have to ask for help! Yet plenty of companies do need help, and not all of them know when to ask for it.

For most growing companies, leveraging UC is becoming an imperative. Deploying it is a matter of when, not if. Clearly, there comes a time when it’s overly late to ask for outside advice and assistance.

Can it be too early? Not really.

Many partners and vendors will gladly offer initial guidance as a means to get in your good graces for future purchases. Beyond initial discussions, timing partner involvement gets trickier.

According to Bern Elliot, research vice president at Gartner, complexity of the deployment can be the main determiner in timing partner involvement. Complexity depends on the expected size of the deployment, how much legacy technology is being migrated, and the range of functions that will be supported.

“If you’re trying to port numbering plans or bring up multiple offices, that adds complexity,” says Elliot. “Basically, the more moving parts, the more complex—then you look at those moving parts and talk to your IT people and go over the skills you’re going to need. And they could be quite broad, because often UC involves things like a directory and licenses throughout different areas of the enterprise. Marshal your resources, determine what you’re going to need, and then you’ll know whether you need to go outside. The more complex the project, the more likely it is that you’ll want that help.”

At the same time, it’s critical not to underestimate UC deployment. Just because the end results may look point-and-shoot simple from an end-user hands-on perspective, don’t treat this as a simple undertaking. Honest assessment, both of the project parameters as well as internal skill sets, is essential. Once the project starts to move beyond those internal skills, that’s when it’s time to ask the next big question.

“If you don’t have the skills you need in-house, does it make sense to get your people trained?” asks Matthew Woodget, senior product manager for Microsoft Lync. “If not, then you would be well advised to bring in a systems integrator who has expertise in telephony as well as IM, presence, conferencing—and let’s not forget Exchange and Active Directory. UC includes the convergence of both computing and telephony. As such, having folks onboard with the skills and experience needed to understand your telephony setup, plan out the telephony subsets of UC, and integrate it all into your all-up UC solution, as well as your other technology investments, is critical.”

William Van Winkle has been a full-time tech writer and author since 1998. He specializes in a wide range of coverage areas, including unified communications, virtualization, Cloud Computing, and more. William lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his wife and 2.4 kids, and—when not scrambling to meet article deadlines—he enjoys reading, travel, and writing fiction.