1. Why do I need a plan for my UC audio device deployment?

UC audio devices, such as headsets, are increasingly becoming a critical element for maximizing UC platform investments. Selecting the right audio device — corded, wireless, speakerphone and so on — depends on each user’s functional role, personal characteristics and work location. These factors, and more, need to be considered and planned carefully if you want your organization to have a highly successful adoption and quality experience that enhances business communications.

2. Why do I need to establish a strategy for deploying audio devices?

There are several approaches that you can pursue. Each has different implications for IT organizations and users. Determining and planning for the right scenario for your organization is strongly recommended. A solid audio device deployment strategy is the foundation for mitigating risk and achieving the goals and key business objectives associated with your UC environment.

3. Why do I need to assess user needs? Where would I start?

We recommend speaking with HR and department managers to understand user needs and define user profiles. Discuss what kind of audio device is appropriate for what type of employee. Take people’s wishes and concerns into consideration. This will pay off during the adoption phase. Utilize your existing communication vehicles and consider distributing surveys to obtain feedback on user needs.

These are just a few FAQs to get you thinking about the details required for UC audio device deployments. If you have others to share, please let us know.

Read our full list of Planning FAQs or for more detailed information about planning for UC audio device adoption, make sure to check out the UC Toolkit.

1.Recognize that introducing UC audio devices will impact the infrastructure of the company as well as how users perform business communications. It’s important that the audio devices deployed meet your company’s goals, user needs, culture, and objectives.

2. Understand your users. There may be people with completely different styles of working in the office. For example, you may have sales representatives who are constantly on the move and other office workers who prefer to sit at their desk in a quieter environment. Depending on their role, they may need different audio devices in order to best meet their business communications needs.  From there, you will also have a better understanding of what devices to trial.

3. It’s best to select a representative sample of workers to participate in the trial of your chosen audio devices. As stated before, different workers have different needs and would give the most accurate feedback to further narrow down which devices would be best.

For more FAQs about trialing audio devices, read the full UC Toolkit Trial FAQ.

For more detailed information about trialing UC audio devices and other steps to consider when moving to a full deployment, make sure to check out the UC Toolkit.

BYOD can be a cost saving method for your company.  If employees bring their own laptops and smartphones, that’s fewer your business has to provide for them.  This also applies for data and phone plans on devices that can get costly per employee.  Since some would argue that employees are better equipped at home than they are at work, why not save some money and allow your users to bring in their updated device that they are comfortable with.  These cost savings on hardware can be turned around and placed into greater software for the devices to help keep seamless communication throughout your organization.

We all know how important morale is in an office.  Upset or low morale employees don’t work well.  As their happiness grows, so does their productivity.  Users who are allowed to bring in their own devices can help boost that morale and productivity.  People like using their own devices, that’s why they bought them in the first place.  Giving them that little sense of freedom to choose what device to do their work on seems to help them get through the day, all while boosting work levels.  Empowering your employees certainly makes a positive difference, and all it takes is something as small as letting them bring their own laptop to work.

BYOD allows users to have access to their data at all times, and can even access things from home in a pinch if needed.  Now that doesn’t mean having to work through dinner every night, but perhaps being able to finish up your days’ work from home after lunch, or work from home without having to come into the office because that’s the only way to access your files.  This is especially helpful for users that come into an office and sit in a general area, but not necessarily at the same desk each day.  This method called “Hoteling” is becoming more and more common among open offices, and would be quite difficult to achieve without the benefits of BYOD.  Using the device they prefer, in whichever seat they want, helps them start off their day in a positive light.

Bring your own device may have some risks involved, but many of those can be managed through standard IT practices and training.  The benefits are certainly tangible, as you will see immediate cost savings and employee morale boosts.  As long as proper security measures are taken, BYOD looks to be a great solution to increase productivity and morale in the workplace.

The white paper released by Tangoe states that “50 percent of businesses in the U.S. and EMEA allow BYOD access to secure corporate networks, while 23 percent of BYOD workers claim their device is not an IT approved device.”  These rogue devices can easily breach a hole in security, and many times, all it takes is one device to cause a lot of damage.  What if it’s not just one device though?  According to PriceWaterhouseCooper’s global survey of CIO’s in 2011, 28% of their workforce used personal devices for work-related tasks and that this number was expected to grow to 35% within two years.  We already have seen that many of these devices are probably not IT approved ones either.  PwC also found in their 2012 Global Information Security Survey, that only 43% of enterprises have even developed a strategy for user-owned devices like smartphones and tablets.  That means the majority of organizations have yet to even put security policies or procedures in place for employee-owned devices being used on their network.  As employees are doing more and more work from personal devices, this is an issue that must be addressed.

The white paper states “Despite news headlines to the contrary, the largest risk to your organization, is not a hacker or malware, but a well-intentioned employee with an unmanaged personal device”.  So what can we do to help protect ourselves from this growing threat, while still allowing the freedom that BYOD allows?  Here are some tips:

• Create and Enforce Written Policies and Procedures
• Require Encryption
• Require Remote Wipe Capabilities
• Build your own Enterprise App Store to Manage Applications
• Prevent Devices with Blacklisted Apps from Accessing Network
• Build a Trust Structure that Limits Access to Those Who Need it

Almost 75 percent of a group surveyed by Fortinet actively use personal mobile devices in the workplace. The reason for this behavior appears to be the need to stay connected at all times—always being able to access their favorite apps, social media, and emails, even while on work time.  This was deemed acceptable by the employees as they often worked during personal time from the same devices.  This poses the question, is it acceptable to monitor device traffic during work hours only?

Developing a strategy to deal with BYOD issues is key to having a safe and secure network.  In many cases, devices are being used without the company’s knowledge, and if it is not controlled and secured it is a recipe for disaster.  Whether you decide to completely lock it down, or allow some freedom, it is imperative that you construct policies and procedures for handling personal devices in the workplace.

This article describes the findings of the study and recommendations for IT. Check it out and let us know your thoughts and experiences.

Over 280 products and services were submitted, only 46 made it to the finals, and the Plantronics UC Toolkit was one of the top three in the Messaging & UC category. What an honor to be a finalist in the prestigious ‘Best of Microsoft TechEd’ 2012 awards.

The UC Toolkit, created specifically for IT, offers free tools, resources, and end user training tools – all to accelerate audio device adoption.  See for yourself why the Toolkit was nominated for the Best of Tech Ed – Check out the UC Toolkit website or download the UC Toolkit iPad App.

Less time in the office. More time in the car, client locations and on-the-go.

Less time sitting at a desk in front of the computer. More and more time juggling an array of mobile devices to work smarter – smartphone, tablet, PC.

Watch Steve’s story and you will see how our Voyager PRO UC makes work (and life) simpler. Superior audio quality for voice and video calls, noise-canceling technology, and multi-point connection for all the smart devices that help you get your work done.

The Smarter Working UC Toolkit has over 700 IT assets from guidelines, FAQs, checklists, surveys, wireless resources, specific training videos, an online audio device catalog and more. It’s becoming a key resource for IT and Enterprises seeking to achieve the most successful deployment and adoption of UC audio devices, such as headsets and speakerphones, in to their daily business communications.

If you have not already checked out the resources available, you can download the Smarter Working UC Toolkit iPad App from iTunes or visit plantronics.com/uctoolkit.

For more information on the Microsoft TechEd 2012 event, click here.

And if your attending Microsoft TechEd 2012 don’t forget to visit Plantronics at booth #139 and to vote for the UC Toolkit!

For example, a contextually aware application could know if a user was wearing their Plantronics Voyager PRO UC wireless headset – using the embedded sensors in the device – and automatically adjust application context, or even take certain actions. Just by taking the headset off, the business application could route calls to an alternative user, or visa-verse when the user puts the headset back on their head.

The opportunity for a contextually intelligent, wearable platform, like a Plantronics headset, connected to business applications is immense and the ideas are many and plentiful.

However, what does this mean to you as an IT professional?

Well, first you need to get your employees to fully adopt UC audio devices, and although that sounds simple, it’s not always the case. A UC audio device, like a headset, is foreign to some people and it raises emotions around how it impacts their job, their daily comfort and even their appearance.

Therefore, before your company can truly be ready to take advantage of contextual intelligent wearable devices integrated into your business applications, you have to make sure the foundation step of adoption has been successful, or at least begun.

To prepare your company for this sea-change, checkout the Smarter Working UC Toolkit to learn lessons from your IT peers on how they achieved high adoption rates for their company’s UC audio device deployments.

Unified Communications tools can greatly improve your effectiveness and teamwork in projects in general, but especially in internal projects.

This article gives you some simple tips and tricks for getting more effective using the Unified Communications technologies. You are very welcome to comment on the article, and give input to additional relevant tips for others to use.

1. Group your project team members on your instant messenger
A simple but very effective trick is to arrange all the members of your project into one group for each project. With this little trick you can always see the status of your project members, and easily initiate a chat, call, video meeting or online web meeting, which greatly improves the communication in your project.
E.g. if you are running an internal IT Windows 7 project, then create a group in your instant messenger contact list called “Project – Windows 7″. You can then add each of the team members into that group. This can be done by simply clicking on a person and select “add to group”, or by dragging and dropping while holding the “Ctrl” key to add instead of moving. By using “add to group” to a group, the contact person can appear in multiple groups on the instant messenger.

2. Use presence to track the status of your team members
In today’s global and flexible world, you might never really know where your colleagues are. They might be in a car on the way to a customer, in the airport, in the office or at home. They might work early in the morning or they might work late in the night if that fits into their personal and professional schedule.
With the presence status you can easily see if one of your team members is online or offline, and you can easily see if the member is in a meeting or available for a talk. If it’s late in the evening or night, you might not want to call a colleague, but if he is online and available it’s easy and not very intrusive to send the person a chat and ask if you can disturb.

3. Arrange regular online status meetings
With a web meeting tool like Microsoft Lync you can arrange online meetings where you can share documents, show presentations and see each other on video. One of the benefits with web meetings is that you can meet regularly across geographical boundaries and with much higher quality than just a phone conference.
You can use this very effectively in your projects to arrange regular status meetings where you
• Discuss the progress of the project
• Get input from each team member on their status
• Discuss any critical issues
• Agree on to-do’s and priorities
Web meeting is also a very effective way to keep your management informed on the progress. The information needed for the management is very often underestimated, and with an online meeting you can quickly give a high quality update.
The web meetings can also be used by each team member to hold online meetings with each other to discuss specific tasks in the project, e.g. two team members might go through documentation in a Word document of the backup plan for the Windows 7 project.

4. Use an online document library
In any project there is typically a large amount of e-mails going between the projects members. By using an online document library, you can reduce the amount and size of e-mails and you can ensure that it’s easy to always find the latest version of the documents.
With document libraries such as Sharepoint, you can additionally have a quick overview of the presence status of your team members and you can add elements like discussion groups and comments on your documents.

5. Use online meetings to educate and inform your end users
In any project there is typical some end-users that need to be informed and/or educated in the results of the project.
Without effective information and training the results and value of the project might very well be greatly reduced.
A very effective way to do this is through the use of web meetings. With web meetings you can have a large number of participants on the training at the same time. The participants don’t need to travel in order to participate and you can easily fit it into the schedule of both the trainer and the participants.
On a web meeting you can show both presentations and talk about vision, purpose, plans and implications for the changes, and you can show specific results, like a demo and introduction of the new Windows 7.