A lot of vendors have been hawking their UC solutions in recent months. Perhaps Microsoft’s solution released last year is indeed sparking the market.

But whenever I ask a vendor what UC entails, the response is never clear to me. Generally, I’ll get a long silence followed by the business benefits of deploying a UC solution.

Microsoft describes the concept (question: is it a concept or a solution?) as “bridg(ing) the gap between telephony and computing to deliver real-time messaging, voice, and conferencing to the desktop environment.”

But what about presence? For a while, that was considered the hot item in a UC suite, though is it particularly common?

So far, everyone agrees that UC consists of unified messaging - email, SMS, and voicemail all retrievable from a common location. But what role should web conferencing and audio conferencing play in a UC suite?

As UC is relatively new, I understand that there aren’t a lot of standards around it. At the same time, it seems that some vendors bandy a UC solution that is, in fact, merely an aspect of Unified Communications.