What is Unified Communications?

Unify - to make into a unit or a coherent whole

Communication - an act of transmitting information

Unified Communications, simply put, is taking all of a businesses' forms of communications, and unifying them in a single user interface.

 Unified Communications is an increasingly popular buzz word in business communications. This largely because large multinational companies, like Cisco, have incorporated the term into their marketing shtick. Here is a chart, courtesy of Google, which demonstrates the rise in popularity of this term starting about 5 years ago. 

What Communications are we Unifying?

Businesses use many different forms of communications. Here are the most common:

• Voice Calls
  • Using Desk Phones in the Office
  • Using Desk Phones in a Home Office
  • Using Cellular Phones
  • Using Soft Phones on Laptop Computers, or Smart Phones
• Voicemail
• Email
• Fax
• Chat
• SMS Text
• Status Monitoring
  • For Chat think Idle, Away, Available
  • For Desk Phones think Idle, On a Call
• Real Time Call Control

How are they Unified? What are some Examples?

• Voicemail to Email

  With Voicemail to Email, you can receive your voicemails, through your email client. Whenever someone leaves a voicemail for you, you will receive an email with the voicemail message attached.

• Fax to Email

  Receive your faxes by email as pdf attachments

• Click To Dial

  Place calls using your office desk phone, simply by clicking on a telephone number in your web browser.

• Extension to extension calling throughout all of your Offices and your Home Offices 

  VoIP Phone Systems allow you to connect phones in disparate geographic locations to the same phone system.

• Receive calls to your desk phone on your mobile phone or in your home office
• Monitor your employees availability status from your home office
• Much Much More

  As you can see there are is a lot of flexibility in the combinations of communications and in the ways that you combine them and some certainly make more sense than others.

Conclusion

The process of leveraging modern technology to integrate the various forms of existing business communications is referred to as Unified Communications. There is no specific universally accepted set of features signified by Unified Communications, instead a wide variety. Learn more about modern communication features at our Hosted PBX Page, our Business Phone Systems page, or at our Hosted PBX Features page.