unified communications (UC)
Unified Communications(UC) is an approach to bring together the diversity of modern communication technologies. It involves coordinating the various telecommunications services such as e-mail, unified messaging (UM), telephone, cell phone, voice mail, instant messaging( IM), video conferencing, file sharing and other services under one user interface so that the user can use them more efficiently.
The wide variety of differences in terminals and services can be seen in the various asynchronous services, real-time services, and programs that use different address files, phone directories, and many other application programs.
Unified Communications greatly improves the communication and interaction of individuals, groups and companies. With unified communications, many different communication channels can be coordinated and the forms of communication can be directly integrated with business applications. A prerequisite for functional unified communications is the ability to migrate solutions and systems and to check new technologies that are to be integrated into unified communications for their migration and implementation capability. For example, the integration of Internet telephony( VoIP) or computer telephony integration( CTI). Another prerequisite for a smooth flow of information is a standardized platform whose components can communicate with each other. For unified messaging, the standardized protocols Simple Mail Transfer Protocol( SMTP), Internet Message Access Protocol( IMAP) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol( LDAP) are suitable for communication with messaging systems. For the UMS server, the Common Application Programming Interface( CAPI), Session Initiation Protocol ( SIP) and H.323 are suitable as interfaces to the PBX.
With unified communications, the user should ideally always be reached via the service and the end device that he is currently using in the environment: the cell phone outside the office or in the M-Office, the landline phone in the office or instant messaging during meetings. Unified communications is designed to route messages to the appropriate place. It should provide a homogeneous communication platform and link the communication channels accordingly. However, this also means that the technical and organizational prerequisites for this must first be created.
One approach to unified communications is server-based computing( SBC); one approach to outsourcing unified communications for outsourcing is IP-based unified communications as a service( UCaaS).