Microsoft Lync 2013 Unified Communications: From Telephony to Real-Time Communication in the Digital Age

Complete coverage of all topics for a unified communications strategy

Overview

• A real business case and example project showing you how you can optimize costs and improve your competitive advantage with a Unified Communications project
• The book combines both business and the latest relevant technical information so it is a great reference for business stakeholders, IT decision makers, and UC technical experts.
• All that you need to know about Unified Communications and the evolution of telecommunications is packed in this book.

In Detail

Unified Communications brings all relevant types of communication technology and modalities together: telephony, chat, availability information, video, sharing, and the integration into line of business software.

"Microsoft Lync 2013 Unified Communications: From Telephony to Real Time Communication in the Digital Age" is a business and technology book combined into one about Unified Communications and it shares everything you need to know: how to evaluate and integrate a Unified Communications project in your own company and how you plan, design, and implement the technology itself. Additionally you get to know current innovations and available technologies for social networking, collaboration, cloud services, contact centers, and also enhanced collaboration for mobile devices. This book also offers a real business case of a transformational project from traditional telecommunications to Unified Communications and what business case you can realize for all business sizes.

Get to know what Unified Communications is about and how you can use it in your company to reduce cost and increase the level of effective communication and collaboration.

This book offers you eight compelling chapters with a mix of business and technology content. Unified Communications is a great and very important topic in the evolution of how we communicate and collaborate and on how to create a better interface to customers and business partners.

"Microsoft Lync 2013 Unified Communications: From Telephony to Real Time Communication in the Digital Age" is a unique book which brings business relevant content and technical details of Unified Communications together in one place with everything that you need to know.

In this book, you will learn how you can use the benefits of innovative communication technology for your business and how this technology can be implemented in your company’s environment.

What you will learn from this book

• History of telecommunications.
• From the past to today: Unified Communications, collaborations, social networking, and cloud technology.
• Implement real time collaboration with knowledge management.
• Improve collaboration between companies.
• The business case: where to save costs and optimize inside the company.
• An example project: What factors need to be considered when implementing UC?
• UC Contact Center, Skype-Lync and Cloud – a way into the future.
• Save and load text, XML, or media assets from local or remote sources, and communicate with websites and their databases to create online scoreboards.

Approach

This is a tutorial guide to gain in-depth knowledge such as realizing projects to migrate traditional telephony to Unified Communications inside an organization.

Daniel Jonathan Valik is an industry expert in Unified Communications & Collaboration, Cloud, Mobile Platform, Social Networking, and Contact Center technology. He drives the above topics for more than 15 years in the IT and Telecommunication industry and has also lived and worked in different regions like Europe, South East Asia, and United States.He is a Sr. Program Manager - Unified Communications in the Global Business Operations & Strategic Services division at the Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond/WA, USA and he drives the evolution and maintenance of the global Customer Support Unified Communications strategy. This includes gathering,consolidating and prioritizing business requirements from international customers,business partners and Microsoft business teams to push Microsoft Lync, Lync online, Skype and other unified communications related technology in the field of customer care and global contact centers. In other words, He is responsible for driving innovation in Contact Centers and is working to bring the customer care of Microsoft into the next century of communication and collaboration.He was born and grew up in 'Baden bei Wien' in Austria and started his early career at a small computer shop in his hometown close to Vienna, Austria where he worked as a hardware engineer on PCs and servers. After his first job, he served in the Military for about a year and continued his career as a Systems Engineer for Linux Debian and Suse support at a small telecommunications provider. Then he moved on to a well-known service and software company in Germany, Materna Information and Communications, where he designed, developed and led customer projects for Unified Messaging, Speech Recognition and mobile technology projects in Western Europe.After almost 6 years in Materna as Systems Engineer, Architect, Presales expert and later as the Product Solution Manager, he made his move to Microsoft Austria and Western Europe. In this new opportunity, he was a Senior Product Specialist for unified communications and Mobility and was responsible for developing and executing 'go to market' initiatives to help enterprises evaluate and justify investment for adoption of Microsoft UC technologies/solutions. During this time he developed partnerships with Samsung, HTC, Polycom, HP, Kapsch, Telekom Austria, T-Mobile, T-Systems, Bechtle, Dialogic, AudioCodes and many other international companies. He also played the role of Project Architect to integrate Microsoft Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) solutions with third party equipment and devices like Nortel IP PBX with Exchange's Unified Messaging, Polycom HDX 9000 conferencing system with Microsoft OCS R2, Dialogic gateway with OCS, and so on. As the lead of UCC @ Cloud initiative, he led the team to help customer evaluate options (On-premise, cloud base or hybrid) and develop business cases enabling customer's executives to make informed decisions. Next to this, he also led the initiative to help customers evaluate UCC technologies/solutions (especially OCS/Lync versus Cisco and IBM) by providing solution scenarios, technology comparisons, competitive analysis and Communication-Enabled Business Process (CEBP) to make a 'facts' based decision with ROI justification and alignment of business and IT objectives. This process often required him to play the Architect role to design, build and execute Proof of Concept (POC) projects to support the Microsoft product marketing and product management teams. After Microsoft Austria, he made another career decision to move his home base to Hong Kong and then Singapore where he drove business development, product management and product marketing for unified communications for an important Microsoft Lync partner, Unify Square APAC. He holds a number of technical certifications including MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer). He has a double Master's Degree (MBA) and a Master Degree (MAS) in General Business, additionally he hold a degree for International Business Management.He is the author of several books like 'The Renaissance of Communication and Collaboration' (http://www.microsoft.com/uc/de/at/default.aspx) , which was the first German book about UC with a mix of business and technology, published as the Lync Server 2010 launch book for the DACH region by Microsoft. Together with Jochen Kunert (Managing Director of Unify Square EMEA), he co-authored the second book about unified communications (http://de.netlog.com/go/out/url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoftpress.de%2Fproduct.asp%3Fcnt%3Dproduct%26amp%3Bid%3Dms-5222%26amp%3Bapid%3D60091). His third book is about CloudServices (Migration to the Cloud http://www.amazon.de/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?__mk_de_DE=%C5M%C5Z%D5%D1&url=search-alias%3Daps&fieldkeywords=tobias+h%F6llwarth) which was written for the EuroCloud association in Europe. Additionally he has a couple of other publishing projects, including of whitepapers for Microsoft, Gartner, Formicary Collaboration Group, and others.He is a regular speaker at international events and congresses like EuroCloud Congress Western Europe, Microsoft Lync Conferences (Lync 2013 Conference SanDiego, USA), Microsoft Global Exchange US, TechEd, Microsoft Product Launches,University and campus events and also contributes to technical articles, business magazines and newsletters in Microsoft & Lync forums. In his free time, he spends time with Aikido, Iaido, Kendo, Ken-Jutsu, Kyudo, meditation, Bonsai breeding & aquariums, traveling, reading, snowboarding, running, cooking, music, canopy and hiking.