When it comes to Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), one of the most challenging aspects is determining what functionality and capabilities to deploy and where to deploy them. Why is this so tough? Because whatever you decide will greatly change the way every single person across your entire organization conducts business and communicates, every single minute of every single day. And, while I can promise you the change will be for the better, the thought of that is just plain scary.
So, how do you know what to do? In Aspect’s case, we knew that we wanted to use OCS for enterprise voice, but we didn’t know much about the needs of our key business and IT stakeholders. So, at the front end of the project, we pulled together a cross-functional group of our key stakeholders to learn about what tools they were currently using, and what difficulties they were facing with those tools. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about their business strategies, metrics and measures.
After meeting with our key stakeholders, we had a pretty good idea about what they needed from us in order to do their jobs more efficiently. We had gleaned enough information to develop our communication and collaboration priorities, identify cost saving opportunities, and outline our desired pace of change. In case you’re wondering, we opted to take advantage of nearly all of the capabilities Office Communications Server 2007 R2 had to offer, ranging from conferencing capabilities to Instant Messaging and Presence. In addition, we decided to deploy a full UC strategy versus just OCS voice as we had first considered.
We would soon come to realize that determining our core functionality was only the tip of the iceberg. We also needed to figure out what type of capabilities we wanted people working in their offices to have, versus people working from home. Nearly one quarter of Aspect’s employees work from home or in remote offices and hundreds more travel on a regular basis, so this was another big consideration. Our IT group ultimately decided that it was important to provide a common interface for all communications to every single person in our company so that each employee, regardless of their position in the company or geographic location, would have the exact same communication functionality. We wanted usability to be ubiquitous everywhere. I’m happy to say that we’ve achieved that objective.
What OCS functionality is of most interest to your organization?