Extending the Value of your Skype Deployment

–By Don Felman. Republished with permission by PGi.
Increasingly, enterprises are investing in popular unified communications (UC) products like Microsoft Skype for Business. However, not every IT department has all the tools and tactics for a successful deployment or to extend UC and audio capabilities to external collaboration. In fact, according to a survey of IT executives conducted by Forrester Research, an integrated audio deployment with Skype for Business is one of the top three requested UC features.
A Skype for Business deployment already poses several challenges, and adds additional complexity to an organization’s existing network infrastructure. When incorporating audio conferencing, new challenges emerge; audio conferencing in a modern business environment is a complex endeavor that is constantly evolving. The expectations of users are borne out of the landline era, when conference calls were a simple matter of your desk or mobile phone connecting directly to a conferencing provider’s PSTN.
Today, the proliferation of additional endpoints, access methods and audio technologies has exponentially increased the difficulty of creating and maintaining a high-quality audio conferencing experience. The expectations of users, however, are unchanged: the audio should simply work.
A large number of companies have completed, are currently engaged in, or are considering a Skype for Business deployment. According to a Wainhouse Research survey, over 50% of all mid-to-large businesses worldwide are utilizing a Microsoft product for their instant messaging and presence needs.
While Microsoft and its products are ubiquitous in the enterprise, a few questions remain:
1. Does IT have all of the tools they need to successfully deploy, manage and support Skype for Business?
2. While a UC deployment drives internal collaboration, how does IT extend the capabilities of Skype for Business to power outside their organization?
PGi has published a free whitepaper on the complexities of UC and Skype for Business deployments in the enterprise. Click HERE to learn more.
About the Author
Don Felman is the Partner Channel Manager for PGi. Don manages the overall Intelisys relationship for PGi, and has over 15 years of technology, cloud and channel partner management experience.
About PGi
PGi is one of the world’s largest dedicated provider of collaboration software and services. Modality, a PGi company, is one of the world’s largest consulting firm dedicated to Microsoft, Office 365 and Skype for Business software application and integration services.

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