5 tips for using Unified Communication in Internal Projects
Unified Communications tools can greatly improve your effectiveness and teamwork in projects in general, but especially in internal projects.
This article gives you some simple tips and tricks for getting more effective using the unified communications technologies. You are very welcome to comment on the article, and give input to additional relevant tips for others to use.
Unified Communications - what is it?
It is always good to ensure that we speak about the same things and have a common understanding of the terms, especially with a hyped term like Unified Communications.
When we talk about unified communications we talk about the following functionalities
- Web meetings
- Let's you meet online, share and collaborate documents and presentations, talk to multiple participants and see each other on video
- Instant messenger
- Let's you chat and write short text messages with one or more other participants
- IP telephony and softphone
- Let's you call one or more persons directly from you computer with a simple mouse click
- Video chat
- Allows you to have a one-on-one video meeting with another person
- Precense
- Lets you see the availability status of another person, available, in a meeting, in a call, busy, etc., through the use of colored dot's
- Online document library
- Let's you share your documents and work online
The functionality can be delivered with technology like Microsoft Communicator, Live Meetinng and Sharepoint.
If you don't have the technology you can buy it easily as a price per user per month just for your project team, and you can try it for free for 30 days. Read more here!
The 5 tips
1. Group your project team members on your instant messenger
 A simple but very effictive trick is to arrange all the members of your project into one group for each project. With this little trick you can always see the status of your project members, and easily initiate a chat, call, video meeting or online web meeting, which greatly improves the communication in your project.
E.g. if you are running an internal IT Windows 7 project, then greate a group in your instant messenger contact list called "Project - Windows 7". You can then add each of the team members into that group. This can be done by simply clicking on a person and select "add to group", or by draging and dropping while holding the "Ctrl" key to add instead of moving. By using "add to group" to a group, the contact person can appear in multible groups on the instant messenger.
2. Use presence to track the status of your team members
 In todays global and flexible world, you might never really know where your colleagues are. They might be in a car on the way to a customer, in the airport, in the office or at home. They might work early in the morning or they might work late in the night if that fits into their personal and professional schedule.
With the presence status you can easily see if one of your team members is online or offline, and you can easily see if the member is in a meeting or available for a talk. If it's late in the evening or night, you might not want to call a colleague, but if he is online and available it's easy and not very intrusive to send the person a chat and ask if you can disturb.
3. Arrange regular online status meetings
 With a web meeting like Microsoft Live Meeting you can arrange online meetings where you can share documents, show presentations and see each other on video. One of the benefits with web meetings is that you can meet regularly across geografically boundaries and with much higher quality than just a phone conference.
You can use this very effectively in your projects to arrange regular status meetings where you
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Discuss the progress of the project
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Get input from each team member on their status
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Discuss any critical issues
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Agree on to-do's and priorities
Web meetings is also a very effective way to keep your management informed on the progress. The information needed for the management is very often underestimated, and with an online meeting you can quickly give a high quality update.
The web meetings can also be used by each team member to hold online meetings with each other to discuss specific tasks in the project, e.g. two team members might go through a documentation in a Word document of the backup plan for the Windows 7 project.
4. Use an online document library
 In any project there is typically a large amount of e-mails going between the projects members. By using an online document library, you can reduce the amount and size of the e-mails, and you can ensure that it's always easy to always find the latest version of the documents.
With document libraries such as Sharepoint, you can additionally have a quick overview of the presence status of your team members and you can add elements like discussion groups and comments on your documents.
5. Use web meetings to educate and inform your end users
In any project there is typical some end-users that need to be informed and/or educated in the results of the project. 
Without effective information and training the results and value of the project might very well be greatly reduced.
A very effictive way to do this is through the use of web meetings. With web meetings you can have a large number of participants on the training at the same time. The participants don't need to travel in order to participate and you can easily fit it into the schedule of both the trainer and the participants.
On a web meeting you can show both presentations and talk about vision, purpose, plans and implications for the changes, and you can show specific results, like a demo and introduction of the new Windows 7.
Let us help you
If you need the right technology or if you need help engaging your one team, then let us help you. We can help you with:
- Organizational implementation
- Training
- Support
- Solutions
- Equipment
If you want more inspiration you can also watch this video that Telenor has made. It gives a very good insight into the possibilities of Unified Communications. Click here!
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News
Producenten af sikkerhedsprodukter, tekstiler, møbler og meget andet udstyr til børn i alderen 0-5 år, Baby Dan A/S, har valgt at implementere Microsoft Communicator og Live Meeting som hosted løsning.
En af Europas største rejsearrangører, Tumlare, har valgt at implementere Microsoft Live Meeting. Tumlares organisation har 40 kontorer spredt i flere lande, og ligeledes har virksomheden et stort samarbejde med leverandører og kunder i hele verden.
Den rådgivende ingeniørvirksomhed, Cenergia, har valgt Microsoft Communicator og Live Meeting som hosted løsning. Cenergia har bl.a. valgt løsningen for at skabe effektiv kommunikation med en samarbejdspartner og et joint-venture selskab med denne i Kina, samt med deres andre nationale og internationale samarbejdspartnere i øvrigt.
