Training centres cures collaboration headache

With 16 field offices spread across the Middle East and North Africa -- in addition to a branch in Washington -- American Mideast Educational Training Services, a nonprofit educational testing and English-language school, constantly struggled with high phone bills and inadequate communications. Its globally dispersed directors, business developers, and student advisory groups needed to collaborate on several projects, but the clash of time zones, work days, and frequent staff travel, in combination with the high costs of international calling and voice and videoconferencing, made any collaboration difficult and expensive.

Ugur Usumi, the organization's IT director, tackled the problem head-on by installing a Siemens HiPath 4000 PABX in the Washington office and connecting its international offices over an IP VPN via IP phones, which sat on the desks of a far-flung staff along side their existing phones. This made most international calls virtually free. "Communications improved immediately because people no longer hesitated to make international calls," Usumi says.

It was the addition of Siemens' OpenScape real-time communications software, however, that really threw the doors open. OpenScape layers phone presence, find-me/follow-me functionality and voice, Web, and videoconferencing on top of Microsoft Live Communications Server and adds its own user portal client. Each OpenScape user can designate a preferred device to which all calls to his or her desk phone will be redirected at any time, while maintaining complete control over when, where, and by whom he or she can be contacted. All voice mail goes to the school's HiPath Xpressions unified messaging system based on Exchange.

Presence capabilities make it clear who is available by phone or IM, and the combination of these features with built-in voice, Web, and videoconferencing makes it simple to fire up an ad hoc collaboration sessions for far less money and effort than when the school was using outside conferencing services.

"I can simply drag and drop names to start a conference call with a group of four, five, or six people in Cairo, Beirut, and Kuwait," Usumi says. "The PABX then calls all the group members on their preferred devices and calls me back when they're all connected. If users are willing to take calls from certain people during late hours, they can tell OpenScape, and it will find them."

Group members can also collaborate on documents and presentations in real time. If a user forgets to change find-me/follow-me information, he can call the OpenScape server and use its voice recognition capabilities to make the change. Users at a hotel or airport with a Wi-Fi connection can log in to OpenScape with their laptops and softphones and handle international calls via the PABX at the office.

Usumi found the installation of the gateway, OpenScape, and IP phones so easy that he added IP phones ahead of schedule. "The bigger challenge was training the staff that was less comfortable with computers to actually use these features," Usumi says.

The full promise of VoIP edges nearer

Numerous companies are bringing VoIP to the next level by either taking advantage of advanced features such as broadcasting, presence, find-me/follow-me features, Web conferencing, and videoconferencing, or by using their XML-enabled phones as clients for certain back-end applications.

The real promise of VoIP, however, lies in the integration of voice directly with data applications. "When you move voice to IP it becomes an application," says Bob Hafner, managing vice president at Gartner. "We've been spending the past 10 years integrating ERP, CRM, and other back-office applications with each other so that information flows through business processes relatively seamlessly. But there's also the human component, which needs voice in addition to instant messaging and e-mail."

Take this example. An employee working on a product order notices that the transaction requires approval from higher-ups. He or she clicks a button and the ERP application delivers a buddy list of all the people who have worked on this order, along with real-time presence information indicating their availability by phone and instant messaging. The employee chooses the highest-ranking person available and simply clicks on his or her name, initiating an immediate VoIP call that reaches that person on his or her preferred device. Within seconds, and without leaving the application, the approval is granted and the employee completes the order, thanks to integrated VoIP.

In fact, a German company called StepAhead Software, working together with Siemens, is in the process of offering this capability. VoIP vendors are also currently working with ERP and CRM heavyweights such as Oracle and SAP to offer similar capabilities in the future. "In the past, this employee would have no idea who worked on this form and would end up either sending it to sales or calling around to figure out what to do," Hafner says.

What is the next step? "I'd like to see the application itself recognize that information is missing and either phone or IM the appropriate person, but that's a few years away," Hafner says.

Joan Vandermate, vice president of product marketing at Siemens, points out that this type of voice and data integration can be invaluable for any number of processes, such as processing insurance claims. "We believe that by 2010, presence will be embedded in all applications."

Voice communications are headed towards becoming part of an overall software architecture incorporating voice, Web conferencing, e-mail, and IM. Microsoft's next version of Live Communications Server incorporates voice and Web conferencing. "The people we talk to are looking for a distributed software architecture that allows for intermingling of Web conferencing with instant messaging and call management rules," says Zig Serafin, general manager of Microsoft unified communications.