Stepping Into Unified CommunicationsStepping Into Unified Communications

That was the title of our December 5 webinar, and it also describes the approach that Roganne West and Adena Health Care are taking to the whole issue. Roganne was gave an amazingly detailed, specific and frank talk about the whole IPT/UC experience with Adena, which is based in Chillicothe, OH. (You can access the webinar here).

That was the title of our December 5 webinar, and it also describes the approach that Roganne West and Adena Health Care are taking to the whole issue. Roganne was gave an amazingly detailed, specific and frank talk about the whole IPT/UC experience with Adena, which is based in Chillicothe, OH. (You can access the webinar here).A couple of useful points Roganne raised:

* Not surprisingly, wireless, and voice over WLAN, are important elements of Adena's plan for the future. Roganne stressed the importance of having a thorough site survey to design the RF architecture, but added that, "Even though you have a thorough site survey, problems can still be present," so don't assume that once you've had the survey done, everything will work as planned.

* And once the wireless system was working, Adena had problems with a telnet-based application that was supposed to run on the system. Solving the problem required cutting the power in half on all the WLAN access points. And therein lies a future challenge and Catch-22: As Adena rolls out VoWLAN, they'll need to deploy APs much more densely--so they'll have to figure out a way to avoid the telnet issue in the presence of much more RF energy.

* The hospital sees one value proposition in UC's ability to give doctors a single number, associated with the hospital, which would allow the docs to use their cell phones for hospital business without compromising their privacy by forcing them to give out their cell phone numbers. This is really the same issue that almost every enterprise is facing, with a little different spin: For lots of enterprises, the imperative is to give sales people a company number that can point to the salesperson's cell phone, so that the company continues to own the point of contact with the customer--if the salesperson leaves the company, they don't take the customer with them.

* Adena is deferring deployment of IP phones to critical areas to the end of the deployment; it'll likely be 3-5 years before these areas go IP phone. Roganne West said she's not doing this because she believes IP isn't reliable, but when you're deciding what goes first and what goes last, it's an easy call to do these critical areas last, when you've got the system up and well matured. "We are dealing with life and death here," Roganne said.