10 Capabilities Of Mobile Unified Communications

Mobile unified communications (UC) can save money and boost productivity by tying together nearly every facet of communication and making the end result mobile. With budgets tightening and solution providers looking to sell a strong ROI story more than ever before, 2009 will be the year that mobile UC takes hold in earnest. Solution providers will be bombarded with questions from customers on why mobile UC is a wise decision, especially in today's current economic climate. Channelweb.com recently chatted with the folks at DiVitas Networks about mobile UC and what capabilities it can unlock within any enterprise.



Mobile UC should be seen as a platform, not one technology, to tie together voice, e-mail, instant messaging, presence and roaming.



Dive in and find 10 solid talking points for the next time one of your clients raises the question, "What is mobile unified communications, and why do I need it?"

Mobile UC essentially moves an individual's desk phone capabilities onto a mobile phone. Support of desk phone features, such as transfer, hold and abbreviated dialing, while the user is in Wi-Fi or in cellular coverage is an integral characteristic of a mobile UC solution. The ability to sustain this logical connection to the corporate PBX, while mobile in Wi-Fi or carrier coverage, is a compelling feature. And providing individuals with single-number reach allows them to be available for important conversations and collaboration, no matter where they are located.





Mobile UC offers users a dual persona, or the ability for calls to be placed and received on either of two distinctly separate phone numbers associated with a single smartphone. One number can be a private cell phone assigned by a carrier, or personal persona, while the other is a business line, or business persona, which comes from the mobile UC vendor. To take advantage of a dual persona, users should have to do nothing to enable the switch between them other than select the mode at the time of the call.





Dual persona enables users to receive both business and private calls from one device, reducing the number of devices that need to be carried.

A mobile UC deployment solution offers equal voice quality across both cellular and Wi-Fi networks. Because the mobile UC solution will be used as an extension of an individual's desk phone, the voice quality requirement will naturally be higher than for cellular calls. Mobile UC solution providers must be prepared to provide a higher level of voice quality over the cellular network. The same is true for voice-over-WLAN. Whether the user is utilizing a cellular network or Wi-Fi, the expectation of quality will be similar to a call placed from a land-line phone. In an optimized mobile UC design, the mobile solution will be monitoring the call link and can invoke dynamic voice quality corrections when needed -- including roaming between the cellular network and Wi-Fi.

With presence, users can show their status and openness to send and receive messages or voice calls. For example, users can set their status to "available," "unavailable," "available by text only," "in a meeting" or a host of other updates that let someone trying to contact them know their ability to respond.





Once a user's status is set, their status would be displayed on the handsets of other mobile UC users. The ability to see a colleague's presence can eliminate missed calls and missed messages, boosting productivity.

Mobile UC tools can integrate with corporate e-mail systems. Users won't have to open up their laptops to check mail. The same goes for instant messaging. Users can chat with associates regardless of their location or network coverage.





Because mobile messaging can traverse public networks, security is a necessity. Also important is users' authentication to allow them to access IM and e-mail applications from their devices. A true mobile UC deployment will authenticate users and the messages exchanged will be secured by the system regardless of the physical location of the user.

Contact information is the cornerstone of voice- and text-based communication. For mobile UC to be effective, contacts should be easily imported to new devices and devices should take advantage of contact information.





A mobile UC deployment should make finding contacts and placing a call or sending an IM or e-mail simple by letting users search by spelling out the name or scanning through a contact list. A mobile UC solution should also know if the contact information is local or remote and make the location data available.

While most mobile UC users will be somewhat tech-savvy, a mobile UC offering should be easy to use and offer consistent behavior across handsets. For example, it should feature an easy-to-use, intuitive GUI that is simple to learn; it should be built on a GUI that can be navigated easily with a single hand and by using a series of icons; and it should support multiple handset operating systems.

Because mobility is the backbone of a mobile UC deployment, the solution should enable communications anywhere and everywhere. Mobile UC should support full UC on a Wi-Fi or cellular network with the ability to roam between them to extend UC capabilities beyond the office and corporate campus. While roaming is key, a mobile UC deployment also should be able to operate in just Wi-Fi and just cellular environments if necessary. A mobile UC solution should fully operate within a company on the WLAN without the need of a calling plan to be purchased from the carrier in situations where cellular coverage is not needed. Conversely, if a Wi-Fi network is not needed, a mobile UC solution can work solely on the cellular network, eliminating the need to purchase more expensive dual-mode smartphones instead of single-mode devices.

A mobile UC offering should let the end customer choose which PBX, WLAN, cellular carrier or handset manufacturer they would like to work with. The freedom to choose will also make a company more willing to purchase a mobile UC solution. Because it's common for companies to have a multi-vendor communications environment, a new mobility tool that would require replacement of these components would likely be out of the question and kill a potential sale.

Because mobile UC is an enterprise-grade application, it should give a level of control to IT or managed service providers. Some key management areas necessary include cost reduction -- by enabling and monitoring Wi-Fi for wireless access, cellular minutes used can be reduced; distributed management, which includes realtime reporting and online troubleshooting, remote over the air installation and configuration management to maximize reliability; and security -- a mobile UC deployment must be compatible and conform to enterprise security policies.

Mobile UC also should support picture and video messaging (MMS) to enhance messages by adding images, sound or video. Picture and video messages can be sent to e-mail addresses and other mobile devices.