4. How will you manage unified communications?

Given the huge interest in collapsing services into centralized data centers, it may make sense to add and manage unified communications from a central location as well. During trials, for example, it's far easier to locate a single Jabber server at a central data center rather than to distribute servers throughout the enterprise and then try to keep them all in sync. Centralized management also can simplify change management. Alternatively, unified communications can be totally outsourced as well; professional services groups at major PBX vendors such as Avaya and Siemens offer unified communications as a service.

5. What about unified communications support for future applications?

Because the concept of unified communications is so broad, it's quite likely additional applications and network services will eventually be needed, well after initial deployment. Experience during initial trials may be instructive: If it's difficult to integrate, say, LDAP support into one application, then adding it to 10 applications could prove far more challenging. A post-mortem after initial deployment will help you understand which of unified communications' many parts do and don't work in your organization.