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How can IP telephony best help to improve internal communications and collaboration?
IP telephony's frequently touted advantages in terms of cost and manageability are almost always discussed in terms of "outward-facing" communications challenges such as sales, marketing and CRM. But how can IP telephony help to improve internal business communications and collaboration to help make my company more agile and responsive?
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4 Answers
I recently integrated an under 50 user Asterisk/FreePBX system for a non profit. I did it along side of a standard Google Apps as an Intranet.
While no Google Voice integration (yet) they did end up with all the trappings of a Business Class PBX with Voice mail, Conference Bridges, Inbound PSTN, SIP & Skype, etc but with the addition of Google Apps as their email client they got document collaboration, chat (including video,) SMS outbound and inbound and of course calendar sharing plus sites.
All and all, those that dug in and have started using these capabilities are visibly becoming quite agile and organization is happening.
From request to availability was about 30 hours. Had I gone any other route the turn around would have been much longer.
Internal communications give the largest gains of an IPT deployment. Knowing the availability of your colleagues and they way they can be contacted, email, MSn, Mobile, at a specific time save messages being left in numerous places. Document collaboration and video add to remote communications, reduce time spent traveling to meetings, increase communication and save the need to email copies of documents to users giving a single and current instance of a piece of work and reduce cc email traffic.
In support of Mandy's point, "presence" provides the biggest gain for internal communication, plus the multi-media queuing - voice, email, chat, fax, SMS to your desktop- all available through soft phones or clients on the desktop. Other capabilities such as "find-me, follow-me" also enable connectivity that would otherwise end up as messages being left. All of these capabilities are also available as a remote worker with just an internet connection. Asterisk works well as a base PBX and is easy to use, but is difficult to customize unless you are a Linux programmer. It is hard to find VARS that can actually provide high levels of support for the product.
If anyone needs a recommendation for either an Asterisk high quality VAR or a higher IP telephony platform, drop me an email.
I assume your Non profit did not care about security using Googles apps.
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