The latest episode of Modern Family’s “Connection Lost”, which has the entire episode played out on a Mac, demonstrated the way we communicate for business and our personal lives today.
In this episode, Claire, waiting for flight, was frantically trying to reach out to her daughter via messaging, Facetime and Facebook. She did so as she wanted to check on her daughter as they had a mother – daughter argument the night before. In between connections, the producers of the show played around with jokes surrounding IP communications.
Though “Connection Lost” occurred in a family context, it is easy to reflect how businesses today are also dependent on IP communications to get the business going.
Here are just some of the IP communication tools we use today.
Email has become a major tool for business communication today and its death of email has been exaggerated. Besides just sending text, emails are now being used to send attachments to exchange documents and presentations digitally.
Business users of emails today expect their emails to be delivered the moment they hit the “send” button, not sitting in the outbox waiting for the network connection.
The demand for seamless delivery of email is evident in a customer who once told us, that before he had IT monitoring, his boss insisted he write a report pertaining to the cause of the downtime and how to prevent it from happening again, all because the switch went down for a few minutes.
Skype was released in August 2003 and it has become go to IP communications tool to eradicate expensive IDD calls. Bandwidth in businesses today have improved tremendously over the years, yet there are still complains about lag.
Lag on Skype can be more than just bandwidth issues. It could also be caused with issues with devices on the IT infrastructure where other services or users are utilising more memory or CPU than the usual rate.
Cloud services are also a common place with the availability of bigger bandwidth to businesses. Business users go to their browser, enter a url and expect connection on demand. Such cloud services include cloud base tools for CRMs, Sales, HR, Finance, etc.
After one types in a url, it begins the process of going through several hops within the business IT infrastructure and then to the world wide web to fetch the information and services to be displayed on the browser.
Any bandwidth hogs or IT device issues would result in a slowdown of the cloud service you so need to use on demand and at that very instant.
Share with us your top IP communication function here.
