Solving Branch Office Communications Issues with Unified Communications Solutions

Enterprise Communication Trends
Small and Medium-sized Businesses are increasingly operating at least one remote business site. According to Reed Electronics Group, 60% of the workforce in the United States operates from a remote location or branch office.
Although many small businesses have extended their data network to their remote branch offices, voice services at these locations often remain basic. Unlike employees at the main office, remote staff spend a significant amount of time each workday searching for phone numbers, exchanging or misplacing handwritten messages, and trying to retrieve lost voice mail messages between customers and employees. This results in loss of productivity, poor customer service and a feeling of
disconnect from the rest of the organization. These productivity losses can present a significant financial drain to any organization. Until recently, the cost of extending modern full-service telephony features to small or remote locations has integration of Voice, Email, Video and Web communication. Today, the distributed user’s data and telephony are at the forefront of convergence of Internet Protocol (IP) business communications.

SIP Protocol, the technological choice
The SIP protocol standard closely matches that used by the Internet. Intelligent devices communicate directly with each other over a simple transport infrastructure. This contrasts greatly with the traditional telephone network, where transport between dumb endpoints is provided through an intelligent network core that is an active party in any conversation. This significant difference allows the network to become a commodity. It allows any device attached to the network to provide services to another. It is this openness that increases competition, drives down prices, and generates innovation. With the traditional intelligent telephony network, only the telephone company can provide new services. This usually requires the network core to be upgraded, an expensive and slow process.

The above explains why IP telephony is helping to drive down the general cost of voice communication. And why there is a high level of SIP innovation. The following SIP features demonstrate why it is such a powerful framework.
• Mobility: The SIP protocol allows a client to register dynamically with any location, so that calls can be routed to the client using a wellknown address (similar to an email address).
• Flexible message structure: SIP is recognized as being a much simpler and more flexible protocol. Its message structure is easier to extend for new applications than equivalent existing protocols such as H.323, which uses the ITU’s encoding standard instead of text.
• Distribution of function between devices: SIP allows requests to be dynamically routed through different devices, enabling functionality to be distributed and requests routed through relevant devices.
• Negotiation of supported features: This makes SIP very adaptable, as the media and protocol extensions to be used for a particular call are negotiated between the clients on that call. As a result, SIP can be used to set up any type of media conversation, including voice, video, and messaging.
• Separation of signaling and media: Using SIP, the signaling and media paths are completely independent. The signaling and media may traverse different routes through independent sets of devices on different physical networks.
These features are equally applicable in many areas, including telephony and messaging. They have been the main drivers for the implementation of SIP by the major suppliers in these fields. 

IP-PBX versus Switched PBX Systems
Today’s Small and Medium Businesses (SMB’s) frequently extend centralized data services to remote offices, but operate separate non-integrated voice systems. Many organizations have found that operating two distinct voice systems can produce numerous problems. Many of which include the following:
• Inadequate phone features: The small-scale Public Branch Exchange (PBX) or Key Telephone System (KTS) that many companies maintain at remote locations provide few, if any, of the features of a modern full-service business phone system. Few remote employees have access to basic productivity-enhancing features such as; pickup groups, hunt groups, conferencing or online employee directories. Many still rely on manual systems and handwritten notes to manage phone calls.
• Specialized phone system maintenance: Many organizations work with a patchwork of local service providers and PBX or KTS vendors to manage remote-office voice services. Companies must often contact up to as many as three different vendors to resolve their problems. This makes even simple add-on’s, moves, or changes to the phone system expensive and time-consuming.
• Inconsistent voice system features and functions: Companies frequently maintain different voice solutions at their remote sites. Administrators must be trained on all of the systems. An employee traveling to a remote office location must learn a distinct phone system and all of its features. This dissimilarity of equipment and vendors also means that it takes longer to bring new branch locations online, which impedes cost effective growth.
• Lack of scalability: Many small-office PBX/KTS phone systems can only support a limited number of phones. Adding users requires significant hardware investments, limiting a company’s ability to expand on demand. Relying on a circuit switched PBX/KTS phone system also limits the ability to integrate productivity-enhancing voice and data applications today and in to the future.

The Convergence Solution: Dialexia’s Dial-Office – an integrated full-featured IPPBX
For enterprises seeking a resolution to their remote office communication issues, Dialexia Communications offers a new generation of IP-enabled small-business solutions. Dial-Office is an integrated full-featured IP-PBX including soft phone. It is based on non-proprietary communication protocols, compliant with the IETF Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard. Dial-Office combines both voice and data on a single LAN/WAN infrastructure. Specifically designed for small businesses and branch locations, Dial-Office delivers the telephony and productivity features that local and remote employees require.

Benefits of Dial-Office
With Dial-Office, small and medium sized companies can benefit today from IP communications.
Management Benefits
• Lower total cost of network ownership, and dramatically improve productivity of their remote workforce and branch offices.
• Lower communication costs by means of transmitting calls through VoIP. Long distance charges can be reduced by up to 75%.
• Scalability – add up to 100 users
• Ease of installation and use
• Inexpensive solution

Supporting data, voice, video, security, and remote connectivity within a single integrated system of gateways and IP-Phones, the Dial-Office solution offers a costeffective platform for extending consistent, manageable network services to small-office and branch-location employees.
Administrative Benefits
• Voice mail
• Instant & Unified Messaging
• Auto-Attendant
• Receptionist Soft Console
• Diagnostics and Reporting Tools
• IP, Analog, or Soft Phones
• Conferencing 

Component Architecture
Some of the many productivity-enhancing advantages of Dial-Office are Dialexia’s Dial-Manager proxy server (for call processing) and Dial-Media media server (for voicemail and Auto-Attendant services).
Dial-Manager
- A Communication Session Server engine that manages calls and client access to IP gateways. It also serves as a registration server and allow authorized client to log-on to the system.
- A SIP based, JAIN compliant server that enables real time communication over IP Networks: IP to IP, IP to PSTN and vice versa.
- Bundles three fundamental SIP servers that make up the core of a SIP network: a SIP Proxy Server, a SIP Registrar Server and a Presence Server.
Dial-Media
- An IP based voice messaging and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) server that provides easy integration with MS-Exchange, text to speech, and voice recognition to deliver seamlessly integrated voice mail and voice messaging. Unified Communications and the Workplace “Unified Communications” is a term used by Computer Telephony Integration vendors (CTI’s) to describe a collection of emerging enterprise communication applications. They are designed to improve desktop worker productivity, facilitate interactions among coworkers, and reduce communications expenses by optimizing real-time contact management operations.
Some of the specific application solutions that fall under the Unified Communications umbrella are:
- Voice-mail
- Presence Management,
- Conferencing & Collaboration Services
- Instant Messaging
Although each of these can be used independently, they are best implemented when working in conjunction with each other, especially when SIP is used as the underlying communication protocol. 

Presence Management enables real-time communication without time and/or space constraints.
• It allows station users to check the availability status of the parties to be contacted prior to call placement.
• It provides an indication of how best to contact the individual at a specific time based on the stored user profile record.
• Station users can be assigned to defined groups allowing them to receive preferential call screening status.
• It enables station users to more effectively schedule and implement conference calls between two or more system subscribers. Scheduling of conferences can be facilitated if the solution is integrated with personal calendar software such as Microsoft Outlook. A web/audio conference reduces face-to-face meeting requirements, and can greatly enhance collaboration among internal
workers, clients, suppliers, and other external parties with potentially significant time and cost savings.
Instant Messaging (IM) is another form of real-time communication enabled by presence management. It is rapidly becoming an alternative to voice calls for communicating in real-time at the workplace.

Dial-Com
Dial-Com is Dialexia’s Instant Messaging and Presence user application. The effective use of instant messaging in the business world is greatly enhanced when station users have knowledge of other station users availability provided by a presence management software solution. Dial-Com is a full-featured instant messaging solution that includes contact lists and the option to send e-mails when parties are not available. An invaluable feature is the ability to convert an active instant messaging event into a telephone call with a few clicks of the mouse. Instant messaging is available to station users via their desktop client or a variety of mobile communications devices.