Other Finalists : Reliance Communications : MyWorld

Unified communication is one of the hot technologies that organizations are

opting today. MyWorld is a UC solution which is deployed at Reliance

Communication to help PAN-India employees to collaborate with each other more

securely and efficiently.

Apart from management of electronic documents, it provides lots of other good

features, such as 'spaces', which is the extended online workspace for the user.

This portal also provides a number of applications for managing and sharing

documents and contents, such as wikis, blogs, file repositories, etc. It also

provides mailing and voice call functionality within a single window and you

don't need to open separate application to mail or pickup phone to call. Plus,

one can also send SMS directly to the person he wants through the portal with a

single click. One interesting thing is the real time monitoring of printouts

that are taken across the organization. This step was taken as a Green IT

initiative by the organization. This helped them in reducing the number of

printouts. In the homepage of the portal itself, employees can find lot of

information, such as news, market watch, live scores of games, etc and the

employees need not go out to find all these.

Earlier, the Web 2.0 portal lacked number of functionalities that were needed

by the organization. For example, the report generation was not flexible, and

one had to login to each system separately and then retrieve data. This process

used to take a day or two, but now it takes hardly a minute.

During the process they faced a number of business as well as technical

challenges. For example they faced cultural barrier, implementing Single-Sign-On

(SSO) across different business groups which is required for integrating various

applications on 'My World' (more than 100 mail and application servers),

converting the existing legacy applications data model to suit the business

reporting engine using Web 2.0 technology, developing module for users to

communicate via System IP / extension or mobile number, etc. They have benefited

a lot from the implementation. There was 15-20% reduction in training time and

cost, 22% reduction in paper consumption, 10% reduction in maintaince cost and

so on. End user has also been benefited a lot.

Dr Sumit Chowdhury CIO

Now they have one-stop customizable platform for all information and

communication needs, easy and better decision making through effective

information integration, easy document sharing, easy accessibility of

centralized resources. In future they are looking forward to deploying

upcoming best technologies for more efficiency, implementing employee

tracking service which provides MDN to BTS tracking, enabling 'MyWorld'

mobile, etc.