The field of unified communications & collaboration (UCC) and social networking arose from the global trend of devising new methods using new technologies to allow cooperation between employees, customers, partners, corporate collaborations, networks alliances, and economic interactions between business organizations.

In addition to these new collaboration opportunities, UCC offers increasingly sustainable cost savings for organizations utilizing cloud services. Cloud service is an alternative to the standard IT environment and could perhaps lead the emergence towards the next new standard.

The drive to improve as an individual and organization supports all of these innovations to the next stages of development, which is to make it easier to transfer information among the recipients. Thus, technological and organizational structures will become an even more relevant and decisive competitive factor in the future.

However, unified communications, collaboration, or social networks would be just another technical invention or additional terminologies if not used efficiently for communication, information exchange, or in areas of knowledge or cooperation management.

You will learn in the next chapters the benefits and potential for success from unified communications using these technologies.