Empowering Help DesksEmpowering Help Desks

Unimax gives simple telecom tasks to Tier 1 agents, freeing up technical staff for higher-value work.

Communications is becoming more strategic, or at least it should be. Many enterprises want to offload the care and feeding of basic voice functions, so that communications experts can focus more effort on the higher-level integrations and applications that could drive real business value.

One choice for offloading the basic tasks of what we used to call the telecom staff, is the push the whole system off into the cloud. That may make sense for many business reasons, but if the deployment is staying in house, there still may be a drive toward greater end user self-service or at least more basic help-desk enablement.

That's what Unimax has been trying to do with a number of its recent releases. Last year the company came out with LineOne, an online portal that enables user self-service. Now they've followed that up with HelpOne, which gives similar capabilities to Tier 1 help desk agents.

Teresa Dixon of Unimax said HelpOne addresses some specific obstacles that companies tend to have when they try to push down basic provisioning tasks like voice mail password reset, from the telecom engineer level to the help desk level. This includes:

* configurability that lets the enterprise decide just how much control to put in the hands of the help desk agents;

* a Unimax interface that presents phone and voice mail attributes from different vendors in a single application (Unimax supports Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, and AVST); and

* support for diverse data capabilities and naming conventions, password lengths, etc. These vary from vendor to vendor.

The system is priced per endpoint managed (as opposed to per agent enabled). Unimax didn't disclose pricing, but Teresa Dixon said the product is GA now.