Dell Software has announced the newest release of its Unified Communications Command Suite, which adds analytics reporting for Office 365 for Exchange Online and Cisco Unified Communications Manager to Dell’s cross-platform analytics and diagnostics solution. Unified Communications Command Suite 8.1, the market’s only solution to offer analytics and diagnostics across both Microsoft Exchange and Lync, now expands an organisation’s capability to harness the valuable intelligence in its unified communications systems to increase user productivity, encourage adoption, protect sensitive information, increase ROI, and plan for future growth and migrations.

Today’s organisations invest heavily in unified communications and typically have a variety of systems in place across the organisation, yet lack accurate insight into who is using which platform, or how it’s being used. The result is lost productivity, increased support man-hours and millions of dollars in software platform costs and renewals.

With the looming end of support for Windows Server 2003, increased adoption of Office 365, and Exchange 2016 on the horizon, organisations are considering multi-UC platform migration paths that will support evolving business needs and better prepare for future growth. UC Command Suite delivers accurate insights into the already deployed various UC communication platforms – including which offices, departments, and cities are using specific platform features – to help businesses determine where to increase investment and where to eliminate platforms not being used. These insights help organisations better prioritise, anticipate capacity planning for the future environment, and enforce better communications and data loss prevention policies as they plan for their next migration path. Additionally, these UC insights help drive the cross-platform adoption and usage to realise the maximum return on investment.

Dell’s UC Command Suite 8.1 offers a single solution to address evolving business needs
Dell’s UC Command Suite 8.1 is a future-ready solution that delivers a truly cross-platform unified communications analytics solution that provides significant insights and comparisons of usage trends and chargebacks across Office 365 Exchange Online, Exchange on-premises, Lync/Skype for Business, and even Cisco Unified Communications Manager. This single solution helps organisations make informed decisions about their evolving unified communications strategy, and better plan for business growth.

As more organisations look to migrate to Office 365 and Exchange 2016, UC Command Suite enables them to plan for a successful migration with reduced risk by assessing their Exchange environment today, and providing ongoing analytics on communication consumption, security policy adherence and workforce activity in the new environment tomorrow. UC Command Suite’s newest features include:

* Office 365 native support: Enhances understanding and insights into Office 365 Exchange online environment. UC Command Suite picks up where native reports leave off, providing insights into email usage and trends to help enforce communication policies, ensure SLAs for responsive departments, and unlock the data trapped in the most common form of communication – email.

* Cisco Unified Communications Manager Support: Enables organisations to monitor usage and trends within their Cisco Unified Communications Manager, and build chargebacks based on call types, users and departments. Provides an overview and inventory of the environment, conferences and peer-to-peer sessions, and compares usage to Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business to help make informed decisions on the rationalisation of UC environments.

* Lync/Skype for Business support: Expands on the current Lync offering by adding support to the latest release, called Skype for Business 2015, allowing the customer to gauge employee uptake of the new Skype for Business Client. For organisations considering an upgrade from Lync to Skype for Business, UC Command Suite helps in the pre-migration stage with capacity planning and forecasting of usage for specific media to ensure the deployment is sized accordingly.