JASCO's Microsoft/Polycom/NET Unified Communications Pilot Program

Unified communications help businesses of all sizes streamline communications and information delivery, delivering higher efficiency and performance. Delays in the chain of collaboration are minimized or eliminated, resulting in better, faster interaction and service-delivery for the customer, and cost savings for the business. Unified communications allows for easier, more direct collaboration between co-workers, suppliers and customers, regardless of their location. Multi-party video communications and conferencing can deliver significant reductions in business travel, while at the same time increase the frequency and quality of collaboration. This has the effect of increasing the productive time available, while reducing an organization's associated carbon footprint.

Realising that such revolutionary technologies are often difficult to visualise, JASCO has teamed with Microsoft, Polycom and NET to create 3 pilot offerings that will allow you to trial the technology in your own workplace for 30 days. Read on for full details and pricing, or DOWNLOAD a PDF brochure.

About Microsoft Unified Communications

Unified Communications technologies enable you to merge telephone-based tasks such as phone calls, voicemail and conferencing – with computer-based tasks such as documentation, spreadsheets, instant messaging, email and calendars. By integrating disparate communications processes and systems, Unified Communications technologies help you achieve consolidated and unified messaging, an improved data presence, and greatly enhanced voice and conferencing capabilities. Microsoft Unified Communications is built around the Microsoft Office productivity suite so it can deliver the richest user experience with the maximum of efficiency. You benefit from a streamlined, simple platform that is easy to scale over time, in a familiar user environment.

“After completing a Pilot implementation of Office Communications Server with JASCO, Banyule Council has been able to understand the real world benefits of this emerging technology. JASCO has assisted in every aspect of the implementation. They have helped us identify how OCS can best benefit us, and how it can be incorporated into the existing business infrastructure. I can highly recommend that if you are looking to implement OCS, JASCO can provide everything you would need to make it a successful activity.”

Kathryn Green
IT Infrastructure Co-ordinator, City Services
Banyule City Council

Pilot Option 1

Limited OCS R2 Presence / Instant Messaging (10-25 users) Option 1 provides an introduction to two of the main features of Office Communications Server; Instant Messaging and Presence. These two functions integrate with your existing Active Directory, Exchange Server and SharePoint infrastructure to enable end users with some of the most powerful collaboration tools available to the Microsoft suite of products. Presence Communications at your fingertips. Presence unites all your contact information – including phone numbers, email addresses, and instant message – with the various ways in which you communicate via phone, conferencing, instant messaging and email. Connect from anywhere
Presence information travels throughout your communications environment and is readily accessible. So whenever a contact’s name appears in an email, on a team-site, or in a document workspace, it is accompanied by contact information. Presence integrates with Windows Mobile devices, so real-time status and contact information is available when you’re on the road too. When your users log on to their machines, they automatically log into Presence. Presence pulls data from Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 to put complete directory information and real-time availability at users’ fingertips. Presence depends on your existing infrastructure, so there is no data entry and no new objects to build in the directory.

Pilot Option 2

Limited OCS R2 Presence / Instant Messaging / Live Meeting (10-25 users)
Including all the features described in Option 1, this option adds the functionality of Live Meeting. Live Meeting supports the voice and video conferencing tools in Office Communicator 2007 with a rich, online meeting environment. With Live Meeting, you can make presentations, share files and work together, all in real time, so teams can meet and work no matter where everyone is located.
As an addition to the Live Meeting functionality, JASCO will loan a Microsoft RoundTable (subject to availability) device for the period of the trial to demonstrate the unique 360˚ functionality of Live Meeting video conferencing.

Pilot Option 3

Limited OCS R2 – All functions with external Voice (10 Users, No Federation) Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 works with legacy telecommunications infrastructures, so you can deploy VoIP and can keep your current PABX and telephony hardware. With VoIP, people manage the telephone the same way they manage email and the internet: through the intuitive Windows interface. With Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, basic telephone tools like call forwarding and conference calling are easier to use. Dial by name like you do on a mobile phone, but from within the full context of your Outlook or CRM application. Conferencing with a click With Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, building a conference call happens with drag and drop simplicity. You can transform any conversation, whether a simple phones call or an instant message session, into a conference call or a videoconference on the fly in real time. Conference calls that meet compliance regulations Microsoft Unified Communications technologies deliver voice and video conferencing through Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 via IP. This means that conference call audio and video streams are captured and logged just like an instant message or an email. Retaining every conferencing instance in a central archive can be an important business resource and resolves many of the compliance issues businesses currently face.

Pricing

Pilot Option 1 - 2,000 ex. GST (30 day trial)

Limited OCS R2 Presence / Instant Messaging (10-25  users)

Pilot Option 2 - $3,000 ex. GST (30 day trial)

Limited OCS R2 Presence / Instant Messaging / Live Meeting (10-25 users)

Pilot Option 3 - $4,000 ex. GST (30 day trial)

Limited OCS R2 – All functions with external Voice (10 Users, No Federation)