When it comes to workplace communications in the early 21st century, it's the best of times and the worst of times. Today's employees have more ways than ever to stay in touch —from desk phones, mobile phones and PDAs to pagers, e-mail, instant messaging, fax and telephonic and Web conferencing. While all these technologies allow for greater access and mobility, the increased onslaught of communication requests and messages, and the expectation of an immediate response, can be overwhelming for users, IT personnel and enterprise infrastructures.

Today, it's not acceptable to always be unavailable or slow to respond to your messages. With today's real-time communications capabilities, a reply is expected almost immediately by customers, clients, partners and other coworkers. Not responding quickly can result in missing an important business opportunity or cultivating a perception that you're unresponsive.

The more avenues open to reach someone, the more places people will send a message. The caller, from personal experience, likely knows the intended recipient is dealing with a glut of voice, e-mail and fax messages. To ensure that the message gets immediate attention, the caller sends it wherever he or she can. For the message recipient, the increased need to have immediate access to and prioritize multiple messages illustrates why it's so important for companies to equip their employees with the best tools available to manage today's increased message flow. One of the best tools available today is unified messaging which, according to a study conducted by Kirkland, WA based COMgroup, Inc., enables workers to manage their messages in less than half the time it took with traditional manual methods ("Unified Messaging Time Saving Study," February 2004).

Few employees today have the ability to control how all their messages are handled. While they may set up call forwarding or e-mail forwarding, for instance, most do not have one tool to control all the data points. They have few options to alert them to important calls and messages when they're away from their phone or computer, and fewer options to filter out unimportant messages.

Across every occupation and industry, effectively dealing with the increasing communications barrage is a serious business issue today. The question you should seriously consider is whether your legacy communications infrastructure can handle the increased demands of how businesses need to communicate today.

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