Mobile UC products

Individuals increasingly work from nontraditional office environments and expect to use their mobile phones wherever they work. At the same time that the mobile workforce is growing, enterprises are deploying Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony (IPT) and unified communications (UC) solutions. IPT systems provide new capabilities to virtualize communications across the enterprise, breaking the linkage between a user and a single physical telephone. UC integrates many forms of communication such as email, voice, instant messaging, and presence across various hardware and software platforms and also integrates communication into business applications and processes. Many organizations have begun the process of integrating their various communications applications and services.

Isolated Mobile Users

Unfortunately, the mobile phone user still largely operates outside of this environment. For most people, the mobile telephone is simply a means to make and receive phone calls, nothing more. Smartphones—such as the iPhone, BlackBerry Storm, or those based on Windows Mobile—may offer additional features such as mobile messaging and calendar synchronization, but they lack the ability to offer mobile users the same access to communications services offered by a desktop phone in their office. In effect, the mobile phone operates outside of the enterprise private branch exchange (PBX) or telephony service.

These mobile users must endure numerous inconveniences that include dependence upon two phones (desktop and mobile), two phone numbers, two voice mailboxes, and two contact directories. When a user is away from their desk, a call to the desktop phone can result in a missed call, voice mail, and caller frustration. Similarly, a call to the mobile phone when the user is busy can result in voice mail, but in a different voice mail system, frustrating both caller and user. In addition, mobile users do not have access to corporate phone directories and they must often use full 10-digit dialing when calling another employee who may only be down the hall.

Emergence of Mobile UC Products

Numerous vendors are introducing products to enable mobile users to access many of the same features and services that previously could only be accessed through a PC or fully-featured desktop IP telephone. The goal is to enable enterprises to extend telephony features to their mobile users, while making mobile users more productive regardless of location. Some products take advantage of the increasing intelligence of the mobile phone, while others insert themselves between the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and users’ various communications services.

Current product offerings in the mobile UC space are widely disparate. Some products provide a high level of integration between mobile phones and enterprise communications applications (such as presence management, voicemail, and conferencing systems), while others are simply designed to give users more options in how they receive incoming calls.

Three well-defined classes of products have emerged, though specific product capabilities within each class vary by vendor (and by mobile platform within a particular vendor’s solution). The three classes are:

• Mobile extension solutions that intercept incoming calls and route them to the preferred device. Mobile extension solutions treat the mobile device as if it were an enterprise phone extension. Examples include Avaya’s Extension to Cellular, Mitel’s Dynamic Extension, and Nortel’s Mobile Extension.
• Mobile client solutions that rely on phone-based clients to enable users to manage their personal communications services and also give the enterprise the ability to remotely manage phones. Mobile client solutions rely on an application server to act as a proxy between the client on the phone and the various enterprise communications applications. Examples include Siemens’ Openscape MobileConnect, Cicso’s Unified Mobile Communicator, and Avaya’s One-X Mobile.
• Mobile Wi-Fi solutions that rely on dual-mode phones (mobile cellular and WiFi) and phone-based clients to enable users to seamlessly roam between wireless LAN (WLAN) and cellular networks. Examples include Agito’s RoamAnywhere, and Divitas’ Mobile Unified Communication.

Mobile UC Issues

Perhaps the biggest issue is the limitations of the products themselves. Mobile extension features are limited to the routing of phone calls; they do not provide for a phone-based client that can access applications such as a visual menu of voicemail messages, nor do they give users the ability to change their presence information via the phone.

Mobile Client and Mobile Wi-Fi solutions generally provide a richer set of features, but capabilities among systems vary greatly and, perhaps more importantly, capabilities will vary based on both handset and service provider. For example, products like RIM’s Mobile Voice System Client only support BlackBerry devices.

What these limitations mean is that it is difficult for an enterprise to deliver a service that supports all handsets that employees are likely to have. Rather, the enterprise can only support a limited number of user devices, meaning that at some level, the enterprise will likely have to dictate policies for mobile telephones. This will either limit user choice or require that users with nonstandard mobile phones obtain new devices.

Conclusion

Mobile unified communication (UC) products offer enterprises the ability to integrate mobile devices with their Internet Protocol Telephony (IPT) and UC systems. These solutions give employees the ability to enjoy many of the same features on their mobile phones that previously were only available on desktop phones and softphones. Products vary greatly among vendors and mobile devices. Over time, mobile UC will become a standard feature of enterprise IPT/UC systems. Enterprises should carefully evaluate mobile UC products in order to make informed decisions as to which solutions to deploy.

This blog post was originally written by me and published on searchmobilecomputing.com. It is posted here with permission from TechTaget.