VoIP Becomes Mainstream

When VoIP finally became mainstream, again, the promise of truly UC was presented to the enterprise community. In theory, now that the voice packets were riding the same network as the data packets, how difficult could it be to unify them? A lot harder than it looked.

Although VoIP brought the capability to easily perform day-to-day administrative tasks such as moves, adds, and changes, little was done to unify the communications. Users’ identities were still synched from, and stored outside of, the VoIP PBX, voicemail systems still use proprietary interfaces, and now the quality of the voice call was subject to influences outside of the PBX administrator’s hands. It seemed that, aside from adding complexity to the building of a communications system, VoIP didn’t add that much value overall.

As a new technology, most of the effort in deploying VoIP was put into the actual engineering and the proper deployment of the technology, not in the leveraging of the endless possibilities that existed. In addition, VoIP was initially positioned as a replacement end state for the traditional TDM infrastructure. Enterprises that saw cost savings over dedicated point-to-point (T1) links saw value in VoIP-compatible PBXs, but just replacing the line cord that went into the desktop phone with an Ethernet patch cord didn’t alter the user experience much.

Users still had to remember phone numbers, dial a multitude of phone numbers to reach someone, leave and retrieve voicemail messages using the handset, check multiple voicemail inboxes, and so on. Communications were unified simply because they were using a VoIP-based communications system.

To truly unify communications, begin with a central repository of user attributes at the core of your strategy. This repository should be easily updated, secure, and extensible so that as new features are created, the required attributes can be easily added. If an enterprise has deployed a Windows server infrastructure, it already has a repository in place: Active Directory.

Unlike other solutions, Microsoft’s UC architecture directly uses Active Directory and does not rely on a separate data feed for synchronization. Unlike previous versions, Lync Server now utilizes a Central Management Store (CMS) for all settings and configuration details. This store is replicated to all servers so that servers are now survivable.