Before we get to that question, and why I even asked it in the first place, we need to define what hot desking is. Hot desking is going to the office and sitting where you want. Maybe your company doesn’t have assigned offices or cubes, and you go in. And remember, people, if we’re going to live in this hybrid work from home / go into the office 2 or 3 times a week, companies will start doing this. Count on it. And if you don’t like it, go in every day to claim your space. The company can take a smaller footprint at the physical location since everyone isn’t there every day. So you sit wherever. But you need your office phone number, so when you get calls on the phone at the physical location you sit at, they are phone calls for you.
In terms of communications, which I write about, this means taking your phone number to wherever you go sit. And if there is a physical phone at the place you sit, that means you need to log in somehow and tell the phone system that you are at that place and that the physical phone at that place should be using my company phone extension.
Putting this feature into a Unified Communication system is not the simplest thing. We have multiple Unified Communication systems, and some support hot desking, and some do not. If an RFP comes in with hot desking requirements, we can respond positively with one of our systems.
But is hot desking of a physical phone an obsolete concept with Unified Communications? Does it even need to be in RFPs anymore? Because with UC, you can make and take phone calls with your work extension from your computer, or your smartphone, via a UC client. I can do that no matter where I sit in the office, from any hotel room, from my patio at my house, or from the Giants game (which I have done). So there is built-in hot desking with modern Unified Communications systems. But if you still need it for physical phones, we can do that too.