Universities – by nature the most nomadic of organizations – understand the challenges of mobile communications. Faculty, staff, and students sometimes roam among hundreds of buildings, sprawled across acres of land. Yet their need to remain continuously in touch while being mobile, as inexpensively as possible, rivals that of any enterprise.

Mobile unified communications (which includes features such as presence, IM and visual voicemail, free WiFi calling, and the ability to run a campus-supplied phone number and email on a smartphone) is fast becoming the first choice among universities for campus communications.

One university, for example, is deploying a mobile unified communications application for its mobile social networking capabilities throughout its 50,000-person campus of 4,000 VoIP-ready buildings. The goal of the implementation is to provide a real time common communication device and a social networking application to keep all campus members, both students and faculty, informed on university-related issues, ranging from cancelled classes to campus emergencies.

“Today’s fragmented use of carrier plans and public social networking applications among students and faculty makes it impossible to find a single venue that will allow a broadcasted status message to reach 50,000 people across our sprawling campus simultaneously,” the university IT staff say. “By deploying mobile unified communications, we are harnessing the enthusiasm that students and faculty have for collaboration, and channeling that into a single communications application, to provide maximum visibility for broadcasting bulletin-board style messages to the entire campus population.”

Mobile Unified Communications: