Top ten UC terms
Here you'll find our ten favourite unified communication terms, including communication-enabled business processes, SIP, IM, presence, and more.
Here you'll find our ten favourite unified communication terms. Click each heading to find in-depth definitions of each. If you're looking for some specific information that you're not finding on SearchVoIP.com.au, email us, and we'll do our best to help.
1. Communication-enabled business processes
Bill Trussell, SearchUnifiedCommunication's unified communication expert, explains that communication-enabled business processes is a way of explaining the process of applying communications technologies to efficiently detect and respond to changes in the business environment. Under ideal conditions, changes in normal business flow would be detected automatically and trigger notifications via a communications infrastructure to all key personnel as a way of shortening the "lag" that is inherent when dealing with humans reacting to any change from the norm. The concept contends that shortening any latency in reaction to an event outside the norm could prove to be a competitive advantage. One difficulty in making such a concept a reality is that no two businesses are exactly the same so the application of the technology will be different in each business.
2. Federated presence management
Federated presence management (FPM), also called unified presence management, is a technology that allows device users to control all aspects of their communications with other users, regardless of the make or platform of the devices.
Hyperconnectivity is a state of unified communications (UC) in which the traffic-handling capacity and bandwidth of a network always exceed the demand. The number of communications pathways and nodes is much greater than the number of subscribers. All devices that could conceivably benefit from being connected to a network are in fact connected.
Instant messaging, often shortened to simply "IM" or "IMing," is the exchange of text messages through a software application in real-time. Generally included in the IM software is the ability to easily see whether a chosen friend, co-worker or "buddy" is online and connected through the selected service. Instant messaging differs from ordinary e-mail in the immediacy of the message exchange and also makes a continued exchange simpler than sending email back and forth.
5. Presence
Presence technology is a type of application that makes it possible to locate and identify a computing device wherever it might be, as soon as the user connects to the network.
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Presence-research.org offers scholarly articles and other resources related to presence technology.
Real-time collaboration is using the Internet and presence technology to communicate with co-workers as if they were in the same room, even if they are located on the other side of the world. Real-time collaboration involves several kinds of synchronous communication tools such as:
- Instant messaging
- Group chat
- Buddy list and other presence awareness technology
- Whiteboard collaboration
- Application sharing
- Desktop sharing
- Co-browsing
- Voice over IP
- Video and audio conferencing tools
IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Lotus, SAP and Oracle and are among the vendors currently building real-time collaboration capability into products.
7. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard protocol for initiating an interactive user session that involves multimedia elements such as video, voice, chat, gaming, and virtual reality.
According to the International Engineering Consortium, unified communications is an industry term used to describe all forms of call and multimedia/cross-media message-management functions controlled by an individual user for both business and social purposes. This includes any enterprise informational or transactional application process that emulates a human user and uses a single, content-independent personal messaging channel (mailbox) for contact access.
Unified messaging is the handling of voice, fax, and regular text messages as objects in a single mailbox that a user can access either with a regular email client or by telephone. The PC user can open and play back voice messages, assuming their PC has multimedia capabilities. Fax images can be saved or printed.
A videoconference is a live connection between people in separate locations for the purpose of communication, usually involving audio and often text as well as video. At its simplest, videoconferencing provides transmission of static images and text between two locations. At its most sophisticated, it provides transmission of full-motion video images and high-quality audio between multiple locations.
