Business Communications Challenges
To remain competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment, employees must increasingly rely on a variety of communications technologies and devices. The proliferation of e-mail, instant messaging, voice messaging, FAX, rich-media conferencing, and other technologies can lead to information overload, misdirected communications, and communications bottlenecks that delay decisions, slow down processes, and reduce productivity.
This dispersed approach to communications translates to missed deadlines and opportunities, driving customers away and hampering your ability to quickly adapt and respond to market changes.
Solution to the Challenges
Organizations need a reliable communications solution that will overcome these hurtles and enable them to:
- Gain visibility into the availability, schedules, and presence of primary decision makers and primary players in a timely way.
- Collaborate with colleagues—spontaneously, productively, cost-effectively, and on an on-going basis—to produce tangible business benefits.
More than just a conferencing solution, Cisco Unified MeetingPlace conferencing delivers an exceptional user experience with integrated voice, video, and web collaboration and industry-leading setup, attendance, and in-meeting control capabilities. You can realize significant cost savings and security by deploying the solution on-premises, over your IP network. As a component of the Cisco Unified Communications System, the Cisco Unified MeetingPlace application delivers productivity that goes beyond traditional conferencing solutions by enabling conferencing to be incorporated into a broad range of communication scenarios.
Web Conferencing is a core component of the Cisco Unified MeetingPlace conferencing solution that lets you share applications and presentations and manage your meetings. Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Web Conferencing can be deployed on-premises (Figure 1) or integrated with Cisco WebEx meeting applications for on-demand web conferences. The on-demand Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Web Conferencing option gives you the cost savings advantages of on-premises voice conferencing with productivity benefits of web conferencing delivered over the Cisco WebEx MediaTone network. The solution components are tightly integrated so you have a single access point for all of your voice and web conferences. You can set up and attend meetings from Cisco Unified MeetingPlace or Cisco WebEx scheduling interfaces.
Through single sign on, you can join meetings with a single click. The solution provides an integrated in-session experience to simplify meeting control. You can dial out to your phones directly from the Cisco WebEx web conference interface. You also can see who is speaking and can access voice controls, such as muting participants and locking the meeting
Key Features and Benefits:
On-Premises Web Conferencing
Fast and Simple Rich-Media Conference Scheduling and Attendance: Intuitive interfaces make it easy to set up impromptu or future meetings from a web interface, Microsoft Outlook, or Lotus Notes calendar or instant messaging and communications clients such as Cisco Unified Personal Communicator and Lotus Sametime. With Cisco Unified Meeting Place conferencing attending a conference is as simple as a single mouse click; the application simultaneously launches the web conference and dials out to your voice or video endpoint.
Powerful, Engaging Web Conferencing
Cisco Unified Meeting Place Web Conferencing facilitates highly engaging and interactive virtual meetings. The solution supports a broad range of conferencing applications, including collaborative meetings, presentations, product demonstrations, training, and webcasts.
Advanced Rich-Media Conference Management and Control: Cisco Unified MeetingPlace conferencing tightly integrates voice, video, and web conferencing for advanced in-meeting control. Without disrupting a meeting, you can know who is attending, how they are attending (voice, video, or web), who is speaking, and who is sharing.
