Hurstpierpoint College
Focus Group scored top marks with the delivery of a brand new, futureproof telephony system to replace an ageing network.
Unified Communications
Unified Communications (UC) delivers the power to connect a diverse range of communication and collaboration tools, so they work seamlessly to drive ease of use, efficiency and effectiveness. Focus Group offer industry-leading Unified Communications solutions which integrate powerful technologies to fully streamline operations across your business. Empowering your team, supporting your ambitions and driving success into the future.
What is Unified Communications and how does it work?
Unified Communications fuses all channels of business communication and collaboration, thus removing the need to switch between multiple tools, systems and platforms.
Unified communications, often abbreviated to UC, works by collating all of your communications technologies into a single solution - providing a more streamlined and unified communication platform for your digital workforce. This means all of the tools your team need are available on a single platform, making communication more efficient, improving productivity, enhancing collaboration and enhancing performance.
In a nutshell, UC incorporates telecommunications, video calling and conferencing, instant messaging, voicemail, collaboration tools, file sharing and much more. And all readily accessible, wherever your team are working.
Benefits of Unified Communications
A complete solution
Unified comms integrates all channels into one single solution, which takes care of telecoms, video, messaging, data sharing to build you complete business solution design for enhance communication and collaboration.
Future proof
As cloud-based solutions and services evolve and update, these will be quickly integrated into your unified solution to ensure you’re always working with the latest technology and have the best tools at your disposal.
Power up productivity
Streamlined systems ensure organisations are in a position to operate with a greater level of agility, whilst ease of access to the right tools for communications collaboration means teams are in a position to work more effectively.
Enhanced customer experience
Unified communications not only connects your workforce. It strives to better connect you with your customers, ensuring a quick and easy connection to who or what they need, delivers all-round better customer service.
Lower costs
Hosted UCaaS consolidates overlapping services, reducing IT overheads and unnecessary travel, whilst increased productivity which drives cost efficiencies across the business and reduces the need for physical hardware.
Unrivalled security
UCaaS standardised security policies mean IT can handle security patches and compliance updates more easily whilst ensuring the overall health of your unified systems and monitoring any potential threats to system security.
Unified communication as a service
UCaaS
UCaaS stands for ‘Unified Communications as a Service’. In essence, UCaaS comprises of two key elements: Unified Communications (the integration of a range of communication and collaboration technologies into a single platform) and its service delivery.
The service element of UCaaS is a form of Software as a Service (SaaS), whereby your service provider delivers your UC systems via the internet. Or, in other words – provide cloud-based Unified Communication services.
By taking your communications to the cloud, Unified Communications as a Service offers a wealth of features, including the ability to empower your team to work anywhere, gives peace of mind with security, reduces pressure on resources with hands off maintenance and reduces costs.
Unified communication solutions
Focus Group is a key player in the world of Unified Communication and the perfect partner to support businesses of any size and scale make the leap to digital transformation, delivering a Unified Communication solution that provides the foundations for the be that moving your communications to the cloud or upgrading your phone systems to a fully flexible solution.
The latest and most innovative solution designed to underpin a move to Unified Communications and digital transformation is Digital Workplace. Providing everything you need for the modern connected workforce, Digital Workplace is your collaboration platform, your mobile phone, your landline, your broadband, your emails, documents, spreadsheets, slides and your security protection all in one place.
Wrapped with your choice of technical support, expert service and proactive management from the Focus Group team. One bill. One point of contact. Enabling you to focus on the important things in your business, like growth and development, while saving you money, freeing up resource and reducing the stress of managing your essential business IT.
Frequently asked questions
Why is unified communications so important?
Unified Communications will enable your business to keep up with the rapid pace at which technologies, work processes and – most importantly - customer expectations, are evolving.
Why does your business need unified communications?
Unified Communications fuses all business communication and collaboration systems, allowing you to seamlessly connect your teams, resources and customers. Ultimately, Unified Communications removes the need to switch between multiple platforms and delivers the technology to allow your team to work easily, efficiently and effectively.
How does unified communications work?
In its simplest form, Unified Communications works by implementing a collection of communication methods and collaboration tools, into a singular system. Allowing your team to interact with customers, and each other, via phone, email, SMS, videoconferencing and instant messaging from wherever they are based.
What are the components of unified communications?
Unified Communications incorporates the following components:- voice & telephony, meeting solutions e.g. video or audio conferencing, messaging e.g. email or live chat, desktop client and applications to support collaboration.
What can Unified Communications merge?
Unified Communications (UC) solutions delivers the integration of a range of tools: IP telephony for voice calling, web and video conferencing, voicemail, file sharing, instant messaging, email communication and so much more.
What's the difference between collaboration & communication?
The two terms often get used interchangeably, but do not mean exactly the same thing. Communication refers specifically to how people contact each other e.g. email or instant message, while collaboration refers to interactively working together towards a shared outcome. An example of this would be sharing a document online with others and making changes for all to see. The right approach to unified communications will empower your teams to both communicate and collaborate with ease.
Is Microsoft Teams unified communications?
Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based collaboration platform which facilitates group conferencing, instant messaging, file sharing and one-to-one calling. Together with its subscription-based scalability means it definitely qualifies as a UCaaS platform. In addition, its integration capabilities with cloud-based telephony or on-premise phone systems means your communication and collaboration environment can be fully unified.
Blu-3
Blu-3, with ambitious growth plans, called upon Focus Group to take care of its ever-evolving technological requirements.
Eyesite Opticians
A VoIP business phone solution delivered by Focus Group now connects over 16,500 Carers First staff with their patients.
