Maximizing Time with Customers

For the 140-plus lawyers at Bowman and Brooke, a Minneapolis-based law firm with offices in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Detroit and San Jose, unified communications boils down to customer service. Clients such as General Motors, Toyota and Ecolab demand fast answers to crucial questions, says Michael Cammack, Bowman and Brooke's CIO.

Besides giving clients access to key attorneys at any time, on any device and in any place, the firm's unified communications system provides key support information that helps attorneys be prepared as they accept an incoming call or message. By mid-year Cammack plans to enable a feature that will mean when an attorney is using a computer, for example, a screen pop will tell him who is calling and to what case the call relates.

Using desktop sharing technology, attorneys and clients already jointly view, edit and annotate documents in real time.

"It used to take three to five minutes just to get moving," Cammack says. "I send you an e-mail, you download the documents, then you write back to me and so on." With unified communications, information is exchanged in real time, interactively, without wasting time on procedural matters. "The whole system saves time and, ultimately, allows us to provide better service," Cammack says.

Piecing Together the Puzzle

While most CIOs agree that unified communications can streamline and expedite employee and customer interaction, most adopters also say that the technology can create a big ball of confusion for IT departments. Since unified communications involves so many different communication modes, as well as multiple hardware and software platforms and applications, the technology can rapidly snowball into the most complex communications project an enterprise has tackled. "I think the biggest challenge is that there are so many pieces to it," Fort says.

Virgin's deployment required a boxcar's worth of technologies, all of which had to be painstakingly tested for interoperability under a variety of scenarios. The system's products include Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 unified communications client and Microsoft RoundTable conferencing and collaboration software. Call routing is handled by the Cisco CallManager system, which Virgin installed before adopting unified communications.

At Virgin, the service's presence and instant messaging and document sharing functions required links to Office Outlook 2007, Office SharePoint Portal Server and the Microsoft Active Directory Service. The company equipped selected users with the LG Nortel IP Phone 8540, which supports features such as name-based dialling, conference call setup and presence status capabilities. The service can also be accessed through laptop computers, Cisco and BlackBerry handsets and other devices.

Like Virgin, Bowman and Brooke also uses Office Communications Server 2007 linked into Office Communicator 2007 clients. The law firm uses Mitel's Live Business Gateway to allow click-to-call capabilities from Microsoft Office Communicator and soon from within Office documents. For multimedia conferencing, the firm chose Cisco MeetingPlace. Then there's Mitel's 3300 IP Communications Platform, an IP gateway, to do IP trunking between offices; and Mitel's Teleworker Solution, to extend office phone capabilities to phones located in remote offices, hotel rooms and other locations.

Finally, the Mitel Mobile Extension gives key attorneys a single phone number and mailbox for multiple communication devices. "The presence status of the user is updated no matter which device they are using," notes Cammack.

Given the complexity involved in that many parts, deploying a unified communications environment demands patience, diligence and persistence. Cammack feels that careful product selection is the key to unified communications success, with the CIO and staff making sure that platforms, devices, applications and everything else interoperate seamlessly. "It's essential that everything can talk to each other," he says. "Otherwise, your employees will be the middleware."

It's possible to build a unified communications infrastructure using just a single vendor, one that creates, selects and tests all the key technology itself. "But if you're creating a best-in-breed approach, you really need to make sure the companies you're looking at are going to actively cooperate with the products from the other companies you've chosen," Cammack warns.

Still, Cammack feels that unified communications' case is so compelling that it's worth the effort of juggling and interweaving multiple technologies in order to achieve lasting productivity benefits. "You have to look at the end results," he says.

Like many unified communications adopters, Virgin conducted an extended pilot project that involved a staged deployment to IT workers, administrative staffers and, finally, to company executives. "It's certainly not the sort of thing you rush into," Fort says.

On the other hand, convincing employees to use the system isn't particularly difficult, Fort observes, since people are rapidly growing accustomed to IP-based communications technologies. "You start to realize that most of your users are probably already using instant messaging, VoIP and other technologies at home," Fort says. "When you take the time to show them that they'll be using the same tools in an integrated fashion for business benefits, they get it."