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"OpenScape" Presence-Aware Application Software

The pace at which business is conducted has been accelerating since the mid-‘80s and towards the mid-‘90s the term Internet time was used to indicate the speed at which change was taking place. Tasks that used to take a year or more to complete had to be performed in a few months in order to be competitive and avoid missing all those ‘windows of opportunity’. Today the talk and terms used to describe the business environment is more serious and conservative; profitability, cash flow and ROIs have replaced growth as the key performance parameters. However, significant technology advances, particularly in the area of real-time communications and collaboration, have accompanied the return to these traditional business values.

These twinned developments are enabling significant boosts in personal and workgroup productivity. This is achieved via smarter, presence-based ways of working – ways that save time and reduce stress. In addition, the Siemens’ OpenScape suite of real-time communications software, which is based on this paradigm, enables real-time, intuitive synchronization of people and information.

OpenScape therefore allows companies to take control of the rising cost of business transactions and to eliminate unproductive steps in communication and collaboration processes. The most obvious unproductive steps come from an everyday communications dilemma: telephone tag. Party A calls Party B and gets voicemail; some time later B calls back and gets A’s voicemail. This is something we’ve come to accept, despite the fact that it wastes time and money; in addition it contributes to stress at the workplace. This is one of the reasons why transaction costs are so high and why they continue to rise.

Failure to communicate also adds to another major problem: information overload. Too many messages are left in different media formats on different systems.

Eliminating telephone tag

If the calling party A could see that B was busy then He/she would wait until B was free to take the call and the problem would be resolved. This means that telephony needs a similar ‘presence’ function to that of Instant Messaging (IM). This simple data application lets users define their ‘buddies’, or colleagues with whom they communicate on a regular basis. When a buddy is online, their presence is flagged on PC screens and a message will be seen immediately.

IP phones are ‘Lite’ data devices that live on the LAN and OpenScape is able to detect the status (on- or off-hook) of these phones, which it uses to indicate the telephony equivalent of IM presence. The flag is green when parties are free to take a call and red when they are busy. Thus, telephone tag is eliminated; you don’t call somebody whose flag is red. This may sound like a relatively simple and basic application, but the implications for individual and workgroup productivity are seismic.

The OpenScape environment allows one-on-one and conference calls to be set up immediately if the relevant parties are free, i.e. if their presence flags are green. If they are busy they will be informed that a conference is taking place and they can join when available. Conference calls can also be scheduled using presence detection and will be set up when all parties are free. Thus, iWorkers and their iTeams become more effective.

The OpenScape environment allows one-on-one and conference calls to be set up immediately if the relevant parties are free, i.e. if their presence flags are green. If they are busy they will be informed that a conference is taking place and they can join when available. Conference calls can also be scheduled using presence detection and will be set up when all parties are free. Thus, iWorkers and their iTeams become more effective.

So far so good, but it gets better: much better. The next step is to add the content with which the collaboration group is involved. Dragging the relevant documents into a new Window does this. As soon as the conference call starts everybody has immediate access to the same documents and if changes are made the files on all relevant PCs are updated. OpenScape therefore enables individual workgroup collaboration portals to be created, i.e. an environment in which team members share documents and participate in voice and multimedia conferences.

For more information,please call our Openscape team on 0845 055 6066.

To contact us about this or any other service or product, please call us on 0845 055 6066, email us at sales@nouveau.co.uk or fill in our online enquiry form.