Building blocks of a Unified Communications deployment – part 2

My last post I attempted to show which elements of a network are necessary building blocks for the creation of a Unified Communications (UC) environment.

We must consider that the medium used to communicate is no longer the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) cloud but rather, the data network is used to interconnect the different sites of the corporation. This is called the WAN. Certain ingredients are necessary within the WAN in order to deliver UC.

The WAN cloud must be able to provide connectivity between each site; in other words it must be fully meshed. It must be fully routable as well as highly scalable so that sites can be added at will. It should also cater for QoS needs should this be a necessary requirement.

The MPLS technology provides the necessary ingredients. It is readily available from most data vendors around the globe.

Further to this the WAN may utilise WAN optimisation devices in order to take the full advantage of available bandwidth and to counter the effects of latency and application chattiness. This technology also helps organise the flow of data.

Once the connectivity, network and transport layers are taken care of, we need to organise information about the staff in the corporation. A corporate directory is the perfect repository for this type of information. The type of information stored should include, at the very least the name, surname, account, email address, phone numbers, sip uri, location.

In many cases this directory also store authentication information and authentication mechanisms are used to identify users against the directory.

Technologies that deliver this type of information and authentication  generally take advantage of the LDAP protocol. The most utilised LDAP directories are Microsoft’s Active Directory and Novell’s NDS/e-directory.

In my next post I will talk about email platforms and gateways.

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Tags: active directory, ldap, LinkedIn, MPLS WAN, uc, unified communications