Today, we'd like to draw your attention to a new chapter in a unified communications e-book titled "VoIP: Do You See What I’m Saying?" authored by NetQoS and available on Webtorials. This is a continuation of a great tutorial series. In the chapter, unified communications is carefully defined in terms of what it is and what it isn't. It covers the impact of UC on network performance and examines the needs and methods for managing and monitoring UC. Just as with the other chapters, for readers just learning about VoIP, this is a super starting point and UC experts will find it to be a great reference.

Starting with definitions as the basis for understanding the management requirements and performance implications, the chapter notes that unified communications is NOT about VoIP only, unified messaging, closed proprietary systems, rip and replace, or big cost savings. Rather, UC should be about addressing basic business communications problems like phone tag, number lookup, switching applications, human latency and globalization.

Using a business issues framework, the chapter suggests that IT managers should look at the impact that UC applications can have and ask themselves three questions as they plan to address a UC deployment:
1. How will the new UC applications affect the performance of my existing networked applications?
2. How will the new UC applications themselves perform?
3. If performance is sub-par, will the user experience be good enough to make deployment worth the effort and expense?

Performance considerations should address common communications applications like “communicator”, an organized list of the people with whom you communicate on a frequent (or infrequent) basis, voice/VoIP, video, presence, instant messaging, e-mail and unified messaging, and Web-based conferencing and collaboration.

The chapter recommends that before a new networked application is deployed, IT managers must first understand its network performance requirements, and second, understand the potential impact on existing applications. Finally, it concludes that since UC applications have increased user interaction, understanding the user’s quality of experience and being able to map that quality to performance levels for management are critical and that proper selection of monitoring tools to gain the visibility will help provide an excellent UC experience for users.

To read the official abstract and continue on to the full chapter, please click here.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.