Overview - Microsoft Unified Communications

Overview

Connect with the right person, right now and manage information overload

Contact people based on their availability, and then click to communicate with them in the best way: by e-mail, Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP), instant messaging, or audio/video/Web conferencing. Access all communication with a single sign on and single inbox.
Connect from within Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Office, and other applications you use every day.
Communicate securely while working away from your desk, on the road, or at home with a single, familiar client for the personal computer (PC), Web, and smart devices.
Bring people together with audio, video, and Web conferencing to improve team collaboration and to reduce the monetary and environmental costs of travel.

Put IT in control by giving them options to balance and control risk

Manage security, compliance, and archiving policies for messaging and telephony systems with common tools.
Eliminate threats before they reach the corporate firewall with built-in security technologies, including real-time antivirus/antispam software and security services for e-mail and instant messaging.
Protect critical information and help prevent costly exposure with built-in compliance and encryption.
Provide IT control with failover, redundancy, and scalability across your organization.

Simplify management and maximize resources and budget with increased flexibility for IT operations and administrators

Improve operations with easy, modular, and centralized management tools. Provide professional-grade reliability, availability, and scalability. Provide larger mailboxes at lower cost by enabling organizations to choose their own storage method (for example, storage area networks [SANs], direct attached, or desktop quality discs that do not sacrifice system availability).
Consolidate telephony, voicemail, and e-mail systems to dramatically lower maintenance and service costs, particularly for organizations with remote or branch offices.
Using Software + Services, determine the best mix of on-premises and cloud-based communications solutions to meet the needs of your users and administrators.

Extend existing investments and adapt to changing business needs with an extensible platform

Integrate and extend your existing messaging and telephone systems with Microsoft’s software-powered VoIP, which is based on open standards and documented Microsoft protocols.
Enhance the end-user experience by embedding Microsoft’s Rich Presence and click-to-call into your applications.
Make business processes and workflows more efficient by communications-enabling line of business applications with features such as alerts and notifications, query/response bots, and interactive voice response (IVR) self-service.