Unified communications

Today's enterprise is utilizing more communications tools than ever. From mobile phones to instant messaging, many different technologies are helping people do their jobs more effectively.

However, this richness of communication options has also ushered in some significant challenges. Enterprise employees waste time every day trying to contact others, not knowing whether they can be reached by landline phone, mobile phone, email or text messaging. Moreover, with so many different, incompatible means of communication being used, it can be next to impossible to collaborate properly. And the problem is becoming more acute with a major trend toward people working remotely, and ever greater interaction needed among dispersed employees, partners, suppliers and customers.

Converged Office
In partnership with Nortel and Microsoft, Bell offers a breakthrough collaboration solution to overcome this problem. This offering is a key part of our Collaboration solutions portfolio. It enables people to communicate and collaborate in real time – anywhere, anytime, and across any medium. It takes just two clicks to find, connect and communicate – simply and conveniently.

The Converged Office solution involves the merging of presence, calendaring and communications applications through IP connectivity. IP-PBX and collaboration software are integrated, enabling users to take advantage of rich presence and single-client instant messaging/VoIP features. By bringing voice functionality to the desktop, users can have all the capabilities they would have in a traditional office environment, from wherever they happen to be working.

Virtual Meeting
As an extension of the Converged Office solution, the Virtual Meeting solution integrates with your existing systems to create multimedia sessions that include Web/audio/video conferencing environment for online meetings/training. In just a few clicks, you can meet virtually as a team and work collaboratively on documents through sharing, annotation and distribution tools.

These solutions will enable users to :

• Create and manage a single list of contacts, from which users can initiate phone calls or chat conversations with a single mouse click
• View rich presence information for all contacts
• Chat one-to-one or in groups and escalate chats to audio or video conferences
• See pop-up notifications for incoming calls
• Access phone features, such as accept, transfer or divert calls, or add others to the conversation
• Forward incoming calls automatically, based on location
• Enable calls to reach, and be answered, at the desktop
• Count on business-class reliability, continuity and resilience

Improve your productivity, reduce your costs, and minimize your risk

These solutions can help any enterprise in any sector. It delivers a range of universal and compelling benefits, including:

• Enhanced employee productivity, responsiveness, performance and satisfaction
• Improved speed and simplification of communications
• Much richer collaboration to drive innovation
• Increased workforce mobility to better serve customers
• Better leveraging of existing investments in instant messaging and PBXs/IP-PBXs
• Reduced risk through superior security and the facilitation of business continuity planning
• Improved cost management by avoiding, for example, roaming charges and hotel long distance fees

Rely on the proven expertise of Bell

As a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and Canada's leading convergence integrator, Bell is uniquely positioned to deliver the Converged Office solution.

We combine industry-leading integration expertise with sophisticated technology tools to seamlessly and cost-effectively deliver this solution. We are the only company in Canada with world-class professionals who have long-term experience managing all the pieces that are required for collaboration solutions - including VoIP, customer-premise and hosted PBXs, data communications, messaging, directories, video and audio conferencing, and mobility.

Our experts have a rich tradition of meeting both business and consumer needs. They have a proven ability to manage critical systems and extensive experience managing complex, multi-vendor projects. In addition, we operate the country's largest Web portal and have made a major commitment to using collaboration solutions across the Bell organization.

Take advantage of superior professional services and project management support

Through professional services support from Bell, we ensure that you fully understand every critical aspect of your collaborative environment before any major changes are undertaken. Then we ensure your Converged Office solution is implemented with precision, through processes that are clearly defined and based on best practices. We also adhere to network configuration and installation practices that are aligned with your unique business and technology requirements. In short, we focus on delivering a smooth migration via holistic, proactive planning practices that minimize impacts on end-user productivity and network availability.

You can also rely on superior project management services. An experienced project manager will be assigned as your sole point of contact for all phases of the project. This expert monitors all the work, manages risk and oversees quality control.