Collaboration – Voice – Video

When you really look at it, business is about connecting people. Since this is the case, solutions from IT need to be about connecting people too. Sovran categorizes these solutions into the following groups: Collaboration, Voice and Video. Sovran continuously researches and trains our staff in technology areas that have “best in class” performance to offer the highest return on your IT investment. Sovran’s role in helping your company select the right solutions is in understanding your business, key processes and implementing high value solutions that help your bottom line through efficiency or enabling growth. Solutions that bring more collaboration, intuitive communications and real-time feedback between employees or internal and external contacts should do just that.   

So what is Collaboration? It is just the latest industry buzz word to describe all the application types that allow more than one person to effectively work on the same content at the same time. The most basic type of collaboration is desktop sharing; where two or more people can share the same screen image and pass control of the mouse and keyboard between each other. The best in class solutions of this type are provided by Microsoft through their Lync 2010 application (formerly Office Communication Server) and Cisco’s WebEx suite of products. Additionally, Microsoft has solutions combing Lync 2010 with SharePoint that actually allows multiple users to edit different content in the same document to allow parallel tasks!

Voice is important. While email and instant messaging have grown in importance, voice communications is not going away. If polled about the one system IT maintains that must have the maximum reliability, most executives would tell you it is their phone system. Today, voice rides the network. Therefore, the network cannot fail, so there can be no compromises. Since this is the case, Sovran recommends Cisco voice solutions. Talk to Sovran about how your Cisco voice solution integrates with other collaboration tools from Cisco and Microsoft

Video is next wave. It just makes sense. If two people work in the same building and they have something important to talk about, generally, one will walk to the others location. The benefit of doing so is that not all communication is verbal, much of it is visual in the form of facial expressions and body language. Sovran doesn’t see that video will keep people working in same building glued to their chairs, but today you can cost effectively extend a face-to-face conversation to anyone with a network connection and inexpensive camera. Video is a simple add-on to your voice or collaboration solution. Ask us how.