- Here's something else that needs some thought put to it.
All the excitement in your organization
about using collaborative tools won't matter
if your network can't support the traffic.
You'd be surprised at how often this gets overlooked.
The fact of the matter is that effectively deploying
collaborative tools and technologies
can take up a significant amount of bandwidth.
If you don't take things like this into consideration,
you could be condemning people to an excruciatingly slow
overall network experience.
Of course this is beyond the scope of most people.
It's the network engineers who are going to be
the most active in planning for this
and setting things up,
but I think there's a value in everyone having
a general awareness of some of the types of things
that go into this.
The way I think about it is that the more visibility
into the process, the less likely something will get missed.
I also think that it's nice that the less technical people
in the organization have an appreciation
of the types of behind the scenes effort
that needs to go into making things happen.
So what do you need to consider
when you're building the hardware backbone?
Well let's take just one thing, Office 365.
You need to check your internet gateway
to make sure it's broad enough.
Do you have remote offices?
If so, do they access the internet directly
or through a hub and spoke model?
If the latter, that's going to slow down their experience.
What kind of latency, or delay, do you have
between messages sent and received?
This can be a real problem collaborating
with remote offices.
I have personally experienced having to wait an hour
for a relatively small file from an overseas office
to download because of this.
There are a lot of other considerations too.
There are actually a ton of resources available online
that tell you what your minimum requirements are
for an O365 deployment that will scale to your organization.
For instance, check out network planning
and performance tuning for Office 365
on the Office support site.
But the thing is, that's only one application.
Your network people will have to go through
this sort of exercise for everything.
Surprisingly enough, voiceover IP phone systems
don't use a huge amount of bandwidth,
but if it's not prioritized over other network demands,
it can result in poor quality and dropped calls.
Wanna use video?
Well that takes more.
You get the picture, right?
My point is, this is another thing
that needs to be understood and planned for
if you want to avoid trouble down the line.