UC and Conferencing

Every organization has its own approach to collaboration, and often each team has its own way of collaborating. The way one department or group of employees works together as a team may not be appropriate for another group. And how they interact may change over time with projects or as team members transition. For this reason, collaboration solutions need to be flexible, mature, and feature-rich.

While many point solutions deliver a subset of these collaboration capabilities, web conferencing services have emerged as the most flexible, omnipresent solutions, with an extensive set of features, mature technologies, and a large base of users. Web conferencing combines audio and video communications with content sharing, face-to-face interactions, and device and location neutrality.

Several solutions offer cloud-delivered web conferencing services, but Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Skype for Business (SfB) have emerged as sector leaders. Both leverage existing solutions commonly found in the enterprise, and both can be added to existing enterprise licensing agreements. Both have expanded from premises-based-only solutions to include cloud-delivered subscription options. This report examines the relative merits of the two.

Conferencing is the basic and obvious form of collaboration. Conferencing was fairly simple and obvious when everyone worked in the same building. Today, the majority of conferences involve some or even all remote participants. Conferencing technologies include audio-conferencing, videoconferencing, and web-conferencing. Web conferencing is increasingly found as a component of a unified communications (UC) suite.

In this report I take a look at how enterprises are actually conferencing, and it seems to be a lot more of best-of-breed than a single unified communications suite.