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by Mark Harrison.
Original Post: Great Snow Storm of 2009
Feed Title: Mark Harrison
Feed URL: http://markharrison.co.uk/blog/xml.aspx
Feed Description: .NET Portals, Collaboration and eBiz
The last few days have been very interesting in the UK. The heaviest snowfall in 18 years has led to transportation shutting down, schools closing and business negatively impacted as millions of workers struggled to get to the office. And if the weather forecasters are to believed, the bad weather is not ended with snow and ice forecasted throughout the week and into the weekend.
How is your business dealing with the disruption? Over the last two day it has been an interesting experience how our company is handling the disruption using Unified Communications.
An example was Monday morning when my group had a meeting planned to cover some important business priorities.
At 7:00 we received a message "SNOW CHANGE: Team meeting to be changed Live Meeting Only! DO NOT DRIVE!"
At 9:00 the meeting started as planned with 68 people attending. We used Live Meeting and the embedded voice functionality meant we didn't tie up home phones or incur the cost of a 5 hour call on mobile phones. We used our laptops / webcams / roundtables to attend, and it all worked flawlessly, with great voice and video quality. We did not miss a beat due to the snowstorm and went for the scheduled 5 hours with 15 different presenters, efficient question and answer periods and a great experience.
Furthermore, at a time where everyone is looking to reduce costs, the "Great Snow Storm of 2009" reinforces that there is an opportunity to leverage Unified Communications to help reduce our carbon footprint and save money through reduced travel.
It just so happens that Microsoft is launching Office Communicator R2 today - Press Release
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