The desk phone continues to be a core part of many organizations. However, the demise of certain older PBX companies (Nortel), and the financial state of some current players, like Avaya, has brought the long-term viability of these systems into question. While some companies have decided to keep an unsupported platform for their telephone system and use either internal or external solutions to keep it running, for others this is not an option.
In hospitals, communications systems are a life or death concern In the healthcare sphere, communications are more than just the phones; it is a critical part of delivering the care that facilities and organizations are chartered to do. In fact, communications failures are a large contributor to adverse clinical events and outcomes. In a retrospective review of 14,000 in-hospital deaths, communications errors were found to be the leading cause, twice as frequent as errors due to inadequate clinical skill. Communications systems are critical for..

The ability to connect in real time across the globe has become so easy that we often work with, and manage, teams of people that are separated by distance, time zones and even oceans.
Sometimes entire teams work remotely (i.e. virtual teams), but usually there’s a core team in a primary location and a few remote workers.
Collaborating with a distributed workforce has become easier with the help of online collaboration tools and applications like MiCollab and MiTeam. But tools can only do so much.
Although these tools have made it easier to work together, there’s a very human element to effectively working together but separately. It’s critical to maintain discipline and good practices around the human side of communications and collaboration when you have remote workers to avoid fear of missing out (FOMO) problems, which can kill morale and devastate productivity.
Ready to get the most out of remote employees? Read on.
What is FOMO and what does it have to do with remote employee..

In this post, we’ll take a high‐level look at different factors driving the digital imperative in modern business and how it’s changing the nature of competition and market dynamics.
Recognizing digital business drivers Digital business is the application of technology to build new operating models, processes, software and systems by leveraging the convergence of people, business and things.
These advances are creating new product and service opportunities as well as transforming business operations, helping companies generate more revenue, gaining greater competitive advantage and achieving higher efficiency.
Competitive advantage in this era of business is based on capturing new opportunities by rapidly adapting to changes in an organization’s market or industry. Those that can achieve this level of agility will leap-frog the competition, while those that can’t will struggle to survive. Thus, digitization – the process of becoming a digital business – needs to be at the top of eve..

In a few weeks, Mitel will be one of many exhibitors at UCExpo Europe 2017 at ExCel, London. Aside from a stand and demonstrations, we’ll also be hosting speaking sessions to share more about the best path to the future.
Meet us at the stand Join Mitel at stand D132 for information on hybrid and global cloud, digital transformation, collaborative enterprise, customer experience and the new MiVoice 6900 IP series phones. See live demonstrations of MiCloud Office and MiCloud Enterprise.
Schedule an appointment Meet with us at UCExpo on 17th or 18th of May and we’ll throw in a £10 Starbucks gift card and a complimentary copy of Digital Transformation for Dummies® after your meeting.
Schedule a meeting > Attend our general sessions World Cloud Communications Use cloud communications to power a mobile workforce. Unify your communications and deliver a consistent customer experience regardless of location Learn how cloud communications can be deployed across a highly distributed organisat..

If you work for a government, education or nonprofit agency, you can choose between two options when you’re ready to purchase a phone system—both of which will satisfy your bid requirements:
Request for Proposal (RFP) National Joint Powers Alliance (NJPA) Why do bid requirements exist? Every publicly funded agency must put projects up for bid to provide companies with equal opportunity to win the agency’s business in a standardized format to try to ensure fairness. Agencies are also required to use the bidding process to document how they are spending the funds they’re being given. The most common method for doing this has traditionally been an RFP. But depending on your needs, an NJPA cooperative contract may be a better alternative.
The traditional RFP The RFP process is designed to create an opportunity for companies to compete fairly for available work. Investopedia defines it this way:
A Request for Proposal for a specific program may require the company to review the bids to ..

When we picture the business desk phone, there’s a good chane a fairly traditional image comes to mind—a handset, to be sure, probably plenty of buttons and maybe even a paper sheet of quick-reference contact numbers behind a clear plastic protector. But the latest desk phones for business couldn’t be further from this.
Today, you can get features like mobile integration, the latest Bluetooth and USB connectivity and HD audio sound quality, to name a few.
Consumer expectations are leaking into the business world In addition to this, the design and ergonomics of the desk phone has changed for the better. This is partly due to the ‘consumerization of IT,’ where the devices and technologies people use in their homes start becoming forming their expectations of business devices and software as well.
Take the rapid adoption of the tablet in the home. Many households now reach for a tablet for basic computing needs rather than a PC or laptop. While the ‘instant-on,’ long battery life and ..

2017 is off to a great start here at Mitel and we hope it's going great for you too. We know you are busy so we wanted to summarize the media coverage we received in Q1 2017 in a single blog post. Enjoy.
Nine Contact Centre Trends to Watch in 2017 On Contact Centres
We saw a lot of changes to the call centre and customer experience landscape in 2016. Cloud communications and virtual agents were at the forefront of everyone’s minds, and social media was more important than ever. 2017 is shaping up to be the year of strategic thinking, better analytics, more intentional social media conversations and innovative ways to involve artificial intelligence. To help you stay on target for 2017, we’ve identified nine of the most influential trends affecting centres so far.
Read the post > IoT and AI: Transforming Through the Cloud On SDX Central
Enterprises have become more trusting of cloud offerings over the years, with many leveraging a public, private, or hybrid cloud solution for o..

At Enterprise Connect, we learned some of the ways digital transformation has completely changed the way businesses should operate. But some businesses have adopted digital transformation far better than others. High-performance companies – that is, companies that have approached digital transformation as a tool to revolutionize their processes and grow market share – employ a few key strategies that any company can implement. No matter the size of your business, these four key strategies can mean the difference between becoming an industry leader and falling behind.
So what do high-performance companies have in common?
Embrace mobile excellence Companies with a well-designed and -executed mobility strategy stay agile and responsive to how their work gets done, which means they stay efficient and productive in ways other companies can’t replicate. The news gets worse for businesses failing to adopt mobility as the new norm: the average cost of a bad or non-existent mobility strategy ..

With more and more businesses exploring public, private and hybrid cloud deployments for their communications, Mitel is committed to providing the best path to cloud communications for businesses of any size. Recognizing that the cloud experience must go beyond a voice platform to provide truly seamless communications, we’ve designed our solutions to enhance internal collaboration and transform customer experience—all with mobility in mind.
After welcoming one million new cloud subscribers in 2016, our cloud business celebrated a new milestone: three million users globally. With more than twice the number of subscribers than the nearest competitor, there’s a reason more users trust Mitel for their cloud communications than any other provider.
But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what analyst firm Frost & Sullivan had to say about our success and future in the cloud.
From Frost & Sullivan “Mitel is well known in the industry as an innovator and trailblazer. It also consistently ran..

At Mitel, we’re fortunate to work with an incredible partner community full of deep, diverse expertise. So, each month, we’re going to share some of that expertise by highlighting partner blog posts about the business communications topics relevant to modern IT pros.
The Benefits of Next-Generation Firewalls Extend Beyond Security By CDW
When you think of next-generation firewalls, you probably think they are only used to help secure the network. They have features like user identification, URL filtering, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), malware prevention and application identity and control. All those items are directly related to security and controlling what users and systems can and cannot do, along with preventing attacks on the network. That is all true of course, but along with those numerous features, a next-generation firewall can also can also help network administrators build quality of services controls. These controls allow businesses to rank and prioritize what traf..

It doesn’t take much to become a “service provider” providing a sub‐par cloud communications experience. For example, a vendor can pair open source software with commodity off‐the‐shelf servers and partner with a third‐party session initiation protocol (SIP) provider, and voilà! There’s a new kid on the block offering cheap voice services “in the cloud.”
However, any cloud communications system is only as good as the ongoing end‐to‐end services that it provides to its customers. In addition to the foundational software, there are data center operations, staffing, design, scalability, customer service, and much more to evaluate. In this chapter, we’ll look at ten key communications capabilities that you need to consider when evaluating cloud communications providers for your organization.
Download the Cloud Communications for Dummies ebook > Cloud-based voice and telephony Voice is, of course, a basic requirement of any cloud communications solution. In addition to providing end‐to‐en..

It doesn’t take much to become a “service provider” providing a sub‐par cloud communications experience. For example, a vendor can pair open source software with commodity off‐the‐shelf servers and partner with a third‐party session initiation protocol (SIP) provider, and voilà! There’s a new kid on the block offering cheap voice services “in the cloud.”
However, any cloud communications system is only as good as the ongoing end‐to‐end services that it provides to its customers. In addition to the foundational software, there are data center operations, staffing, design, scalability, customer service, and much more to evaluate. In this chapter, we’ll look at ten key communications capabilities that you need to consider when evaluating cloud communications providers for your organization.
Download the Cloud Communications for Dummies ebook > Cloud-based voice and telephony Voice is, of course, a basic requirement of any cloud communications solution. In addition to providing end‐to‐en..