Unified Messaging

Allowing employees to work remotely boosts productivity, boosts morale and gives your organization greater flexibility. If you work for a government agency, educational institution or nonprofit, you know that working remotely is already commonplace in many organizations.

A lesson in flexibility

Consider the structure of a typical suburban school district. District headquarters houses the offices of the superintendent, the IT department and various support staff members. Each individual school has teachers, administrators and office staff. All of these employees need to be able to communicate effectively, whether they’re principals at different elementary schools, teachers across the district, administrative staff at the district offices or any of the other countless people that keep our educational institutions running.

Unified messaging makes it easy for all of these parties to remain in contact with one another, even though they work in different locations and only meet face to face on rare occasions. But that kind of flexibility doesn’t happen in a vacuum—you need the right technology to make it possible.

The answer key to remote working

A unified messaging solution allows you to keep remote employees connected without hurting collaboration or lowering productivity. It helps simplify the task of keeping your remote employees connected, no matter where they work. A unified communication system may include:

• Voicemail boxes that are managed from a single interface on a unified system
• Feature-rich phone systems that make it easier for employees to answer and route incoming calls
• Collaboration platforms that enable employees to communicate through voice, messaging and teleconferencing tools
• Call handling features like auto attendant
• Additional message management features like fax and email

Unified messaging isn’t a communication platform in and of itself, but a solution that integrates into your larger communication platform. The goal is to provide remote workforces with advanced technology to stay connected in a single easy-to-use package.

The cheat sheet for unified messaging

If you’re a government, education or nonprofit organization, we know that you’re generally required to open an RFP to multiple providers when choosing a new communications platform. We also know the bidding process can be long and expensive. But there’s a way you can bypass the traditional RFP route and get a unified messaging system faster without skirting any regulatory requirements.

How? With the help of the National Joint Powers Alliance (NJPA). NJPA provides national contract volume pricing from nationally acclaimed vendors. As a partner with NJPA, Mitel is the exclusive provider of telecommunication solutions. This allows entities, like educational institutions, that must abide by legal and budgetary requirements to find the right unified messaging solution for their operations, without sacrificing quality and performance.

NJPA’s exclusive vendor contract with Mitel means that these organizations have access to these advanced technological solutions, without having to go through the traditional RFP process. The NJPA contract ensures competitive pricing that doesn’t jeopardize the tight budgets these groups operate within.

What’s available for educational institutions?

Towner Communication phone systems are available in several configurations, and each one is designed to suit the needs of different organizational structures. For example, MiVoice Embedded Messaging is an entry-level solution that offers voice and unified messaging for entities with fewer than 748 users. On the other hand, NuPoint Unified Messaging is a highly scalable, robust messaging solution that can be deployed physically (on-site) or virtually for organizations with as many as 120,000 users.