Many organizations today agree that the cloud is not only a powerful, flexible, and reliable platform for office productivity applications, but also an equally compelling platform for business communications solutions including phone, fax, voice, short message service (SMS) text, and video conferencing. Add the ability to integrate best-of-breed business communications solutions directly into Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and other cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, and the business benefits are huge!
Cloud Communication and Collaboration solutions enable greater efficiency by integrating real-time communications (such as voice telephony, audio/web/video conferencing, and instant messaging) and non-real-time communications (such as email, voicemail, and fax).
Productivity soars when you place business applications and business communications solutions on the same platform and make all those capabilities accessible from one familiar user interface.
Bringing business communications and applications together in the cloud is a win for your entire organization. No more hassles and distractions due to switching between applications and devices; employees have everything they need right in front of them all the time on any device. Your IT staff also reaps big benefits and cost savings through reduced complexity and management requirements.
Like many businesses, your company may be experiencing some if not all of these business communications challenges:
- Rapid business growth requiring the addition of new locations and employees.
- Seasonal fluctuations in employees or use of temps requiring many add/change orders to add new lines/phone numbers, and then scaling back in down periods.
- Skyrocketing conference call service costs from business surges, which IT cannot easily control due to pricing models from the provider.
- The need to unify communication, integrating everything from remote offices to mobile and remote workers, as well as consolidating disparate standalone business services such as online fax and video conferencing.
That’s why we wrote an easy to follow deep dive into the benefits a Cloud Communication and Collaboration solution will provide.
Beyond an understanding of your business requirements and a basic awareness of cloud computing and other popular technology trends and challenges, we don’t assume any deep technical knowledge. As such, this book is written primarily for non-technical readers.
If you don’t know where you’re going, any chapter will get you there — but Chapter 1 might be a good place to start! However, if you see a particular topic that piques your interest, feel free to jump ahead to that chapter. Each chapter is written to stand on its own, so you can read this book in any order that suits you (though we don’t recommend upside down or backward).
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Originally published Apr 04, 2018, updated Jan 30, 2023