Organisations are always looking to maximise the use of their investment in technology, while delivering more flexible and effective ways for their staff to communicate and collaborate. Integrating all forms of communication - from telephony to email, web conferencing to instant messaging (IM) - helps to deliver a richer communications environment that ultimately results in cost savings and productivity increases.

There are very few, if any, vendors today that offer a complete suite of collaboration technologies. There are even fewer organisations that have standardised on a single vendor for all of their communication needs. This presents a need to integrate multiple vendor technologies across multiple platforms and architectures. Before embarking on such a journey there are a number of elements that require careful consideration.