Improve Interdepartmental Communication

May 2012 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Matt Pillar, editor in chief

A unified communications infrastructure enables the integration of personnel and departments by connecting employees enterprisewide via multiple devices.

By its very nature, unified communications (UC) can take on several definitions, many of which are industry-specific. Generally speaking, UC is the practice of integrating any number of real-time communication services, such as instant messaging, location or presence information, telephony, video conferencing, and data and presentation sharing with nonreal-time communication services such as voice mail, email, SMS, and fax. If it sounds like a communications panacea, it’s not exactly. UC is typically a set of products, predetermined by user strategy and environment, that aims to provide a consistent user interface and experience across multiple devices and media types. Your UC strategy can be as simple as providing real-time “presence” awareness for key executives, or it can be as complex as extending anywhere, any device contact with associates across the enterprise. For insight into UC and its specific applicability to retailers, we talked with Linda Eastridge-Jordan, industry marketing manager at Sprint.

Sponsored by Sprint. By accessing this material, you agree that a Sprint representative may contact you with more information.