Summertime heat can cause your organization’s energy usage to spike. Keep your employee productivity humming along and your energy bills cool with these three tips.

1. Use power-sipping phones. Do your IP phones have a sleep mode, where they automatically power down after a period of inactivity? Whether you choose ShoreTel’s cloud or on-premises solution, ShoreTel’s 400 series IP phones are power-friendly. With off-hours sleep mode, the 400 series automatically minimizes power to the phone and network connection and turns off the LCD during non-working hours. In idle mode, the phone’s LCD dims and power to the phone and network are lowered.

2. Use virtualization for unified communications applications. Consolidating the physical servers and using virtualization to run unified communications, collaboration and other applications improves IT efficiency and cuts energy consumption. Using fewer, more powerful physical servers allows organizations to have the same or more computing power while energy use may drop by up to 75 percent.

   With ShoreTel 14.2, all ShoreTel UC components, including call control, SIP trunks and collaboration applications, can run in a virtual environment, including VMware. ShoreTel Mobility 8 can also run on VMware. And that means you can reduce the need for Voice Switches, which will deliver additional energy savings. Plus, virtualization complements ShoreTel’s distributed architecture and allows customers to benefit from ShoreTel’s N+1 redundancy to deliver high availability at the lowest cost. Using virtualization also allows customers to improve application availability and disaster recovery practices by taking advantage of features such as VMware High Availability and VMotion.

3. Encourage employees to work from home more this summer. Nearly four in 10 employees already spend some time working remotely or in locations apart from their coworkers, according to a Gallup poll. Not only does working from home eliminate a fuel-guzzling commute, but research shows that employees work longer hours and are more engaged. And with tools like unified communications and web conferencing, it’s easier than ever to work from anywhere.

Reducing energy consumption is not only good for your power bills—it’s good for the environment too. ShoreTel’s on-premises phone system is designed to be efficient, from its distributed architecture that improves reliability and reduces the need for hardware, to its smart power designs for IP phones and switches. And ShoreTel Sky brings you powerful VoIP capabilities with the power, reliability and efficiency of the cloud.

Working from anywhere, anytime has gone from a perk to a necessity. And people expect access to the same tools, whether they are in the office or somewhere else, and that extends to how they communicate and collaborate.

With mobile unified communications (UC) apps, people can use their smartphones, tablets and laptops to:

1. Stay in touch from anywhere. Adding a UC app to smartphones and tablets provides a seamless way for workers to stay in touch with colleagues and customers, whether they are on the road, at home or in the office. A mobile UC app gives workers access to communication and collaboration features such as video conferencing, desktop sharing, CRM integration and instant messaging—as well as desk-phone features like extension dialing, conference calling, company directory, hold and call transfer. And those capabilities keep a workforce more productive, nimble and engaged.
2. Reduce costs. With so many workers in so many places, organizations can use a mobile UC app to stay connected and productive, while cutting down on the high cost of enterprise telecom. For example, using voice and video conferencing cuts down on rising expense of travel without sacrificing the feel of an in-person meeting. And using mobile UC may eliminate the need for desk phones, leading to additional savings.
3. Bring-your-own video conferencing. Employees can use their company-issued or personal smartphones and tablets to participate in a video conference—even when using a traditional room-based conferencing system. Or they can have a peer-to-peer video call for a quick collaborative session.
4. Keep your personas separate. With mobile UC, people can keep their business and personal identities and communications separate, while using a single phone number. There’s no more managing multiple phone numbers and voicemails or having callers need to call around to different numbers to reach someone.

ShoreTel Keeps You in Touch

ShoreTel’s brand-new Mobility 8 solution provides just this sort of simple, seamless mobile communication and collaboration tools to ensure employees can always stay in touch with colleagues. Android and iOS devices running the ShoreTel Mobility Client have one-touch video calling straight from the keypad and can participate in multi-party video sessions to other mobile devices or to room-based systems.

This flexibility extends to support for a variety of room-based systems that support industry standards such as H.264/SVC and H.264/AVC. Video sessions are supported over local or remote Wi-Fi as well as cellular data. This mix-and-match deployment model also means that companies can implement Mobility 8 in an on-premises model using ShoreTel hardware or in a virtualized environment on a customer’s servers.

Perhaps most importantly, Mobility 8 couldn’t be easier to use. Through integration with ShoreTel Communicator, workers can control their ShoreTel Mobility Client using the same interface they use to manage their desk phones. The one-touch access also frees users from having to move from app to app looking for numbers and passcodes.

ShoreTel brings the best of traditional video conferencing to a mobile environment without giving up any of the features of a traditional system. Mobility without compromise keeps workers in touch and able to collaboration wherever they may roam.