Vague, fuzzy terms may be good if you’re in marketing or politics, but those of us who have to build things and make them work like our concepts a bit more crisply drawn.

That’s why we at Seamless Enterprise took pains to come up with a pithy and concise definition of Unified Communications, and why we were interested when we saw in Network World about an effort to do the same with the term "telepresence." More...

The enterprise office is evolving, and enterprise IT has a big role. In my previous post, we looked at how the physical workspace is changing to an open environment, promoting greater collaboration and productivity. Enterprise IT will be a big part of that transformation. Yet, workspace transformation alone will not singularly transform business. What will? Technology innovation and implementation.More...

Unified Communications, as much as we tout it here at Seamless Enterprise, is not just an end in itself, of course. It is the means to collaborative work. That point is well made in a recent No Jitter posting by Dave Michels, who focuses on what collaboration has come to mean. More...

I was recently thinking about how each and every year, the number of people working in purely “digital jobs” continues to increase.  It made me think of the basic economic premise of Star Trek: When Gene Roddenberry created that series, he envisioned a world where the basic needs of people were satisfied with an unlimited supply of raw materials, allowing folks to focus all of their energy on knowledge and exploration. One embodiment of this unlimited supply idea was Star Trek’s “replicator,” which materialized any food that was in its vast database. While a “replicator” is entirely fictional, over the past 100 years or so, the percentage of people working in agriculture has indeed gone from about 75 percent down to three percent—so the rise of the digital job could be a logical corollary of that trend of more abundant supply.More...

I have a new IP deskphone connected to a cloud-based PBX. It’s been years since I have had a deskphone. The device is not (and likely will never be) fully unified with instant messaging and presence information. As I stare at this thing, my brain struggles with how and why I would use it. In a UC world, using a deskphone (even an IP one) is not like riding a bike.  More...

What will be the attributes of the corporate network? How is it evolving? A current bright spot is that IT budgets are gradually improving; yet enterprises will continue to face pressures to cut costs, equip a mobile and distributed workforce, and compete globally. For enterprises, the network is becoming a hybrid of multiple protocols with elements that are outsourced and, yes, even cheaper. More...

When I think of Silver, Gold or Platinum, I think of categories of frequent fliers--but that nomenclature has made its way into networking as well, as a way for carriers to describe the class of service assigned to MPLS traffic. More...

Let’s add one more entry to the list of really good reasons to embrace Unified Communications. It’s a great way to help make your company greener, helping the environment and saving money at the same time. More...

We typically focus on the positives connected with Unified Communications, but there are still a lot of negative perceptions about UC out there, and an article in InformationWeek looks at some of those negatives, from a survey regarding business drivers for UC. More...

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an instance where interoperability is a bad thing. Maybe if you wanted to create a network that existed only within your company, and that no one else could touch from outside (or you couldn’t touch them from inside), maybe that would be a good argument. There’s not a lot of demand for that sort of thing, though. More...