Unified Communications Expo

I attended the above conference at London Olympia this week and was impressed at the wide variety of vendors in attendance. There was the opportunity to attend business briefings ranging from UC and Messaging to VoIP for Business. One theme that stuck out to me during the course of this event was the need of our traditional vendors to start working in a more consistent manor than before. What may be an industry standard for telephony may be implemented and configured differently depending on which vendor solution you choose. This theme continued from the Voice Con conference in Orlando when both IBM and MS said they would work together to produce a solution to allow there products for UC to connect. The results of this will be apparent at Voice Con, San Francisco later this year.

The other theme that was apparent was the need to change how we work together to actually realise the investment that is being made in UC. If you work from home or have plans to in the future take a look at http://www.telework.org.uk and http://www.henleymc.ac.uk/henleyres03.nsf/pages/fwf , both sites offer some interesting information about how to better work from home. This is an area that needs further investigation as many customers start to implement there strategies for collaboration and workers start to make that transition from being permanently office based to being home workers.

For me I don’t think I would consider working for a company that did not allow some level of home working.