You will be hearing the phrase unified communications [UC] ad nauseum over the next several years. Therefore, I am taking it upon myself to explain what I think UC is. There are basically nine ways to communicate directly with another person. Here they are: 1. & 2. Home phone and home voice mail 3. & 4. Office phone and office voice mail 5. & 6. Cell phone and cell voice mail 7. Instant messaging [IM] 8. Text me You will be hearing the phrase unified communications [UC] ad nauseum over the next several years. Therefore, I am taking it upon myself to explain what I think UC is. There are basically nine ways to communicate directly with another person. Here they are: 1. & 2. Home phone and home voice mail 3. & 4. Office phone and office voice mail 5. & 6. Cell phone and cell voice mail 7. Instant messaging [IM] 8. Text messaging 9. Email[Thanks to Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality for the idea of 9 ways to communicate.] 10. Wikis [My own idea. Blogs and social networking are indirect. Wikis are a bit problematic because wikis can be used to collaborate in real time.]What UC wants to do is take those nine or ten ways to communicate and turn them into one. This is done by coming at communications from a different direction. Instead of thinking of communications as the various devices and methods you use, UC solves the problem of how to communicate by looking at it from the point of view of the single person you want to communicate with. The person becomes the one way to communicate. Devices become irrelevant because UC renders them so.How does this work? Say that I want to call my friend Max. Instead of taking a shot in the dark and trying him at home or on his mobile I just bring up the name Max on my cell phone contact list, or at home I might have him on my IM roster. Imagine if I could even just say his name or type his name on screen. As long as I have access to his name I no longer have to guess how to reach him. Unless of course he doesn’t want to communicate with me. We’ll get to that later.Once I access the name Max, thanks to “presence” technology I now know if he’s reachable and how to reach him. Presence is enabled by using many technologies. Presence actually only finds devices or locates devices because they are communicating their presence in the network. But this allows owners of these devices to use that information and add to it by saying whether or not they are available. My mouse might roll over Max’s name and a drop down menu appears that tells me he is in a meeting but available by text messaging. Again, remember that the network only found the device. It is Max who adds the information that when the network finds me tell it that I am in a meeting and that I am only available by text messaging. When I receive this message I write my communication and click on send.Or, maybe I speak Max’s name into the phone and the response is, he is available on cell phone only. I say call.Worst case scenario, I see Max’s name on the list of people I know and when I select his name it tells me he is out of pocket and is only accepting emails. What if Max doesn’t want to be reached?Well, some of these technologies are opt in, like IM. Max can click on his own name and say, unavailable. But to some extent UC technology usurps the opt in process. For example, unless Max physically turns off his cell phone, the network knows he is available. And not just that his phone is turned on but that he’s not using it. Of course he can choose not to answer it but I, the caller, will know that. With UC users can also set up their cell phone’s voice mailbox to convert any message into a text message or a wave file in email. The possibilities are unlimited. Telephony is now becoming digital. It is moving from a black box called PBX which contained arcane protocols layered one on top of the other for the last century to a software program written in a standard programming language, including open source, that sits on a server. Anything that you can design in software will be doable within your communications system. This is unified communications. Moving beyond your desire to communicate with Max, on the business side, information from your corporate directory will also be available to a UC system. Here, you may not be trying to find a person but rather a skill set or one of many managers who can approve a document to complete the business process. In the old days dial tone only gave you access to a device on the other end. It often became a roadblock stopping the workflow. On the other hand, the unified communications dial tone is a facilitator that removes the roadblocks and keeps the workflow moving along toward completion. Technology Industry