unified communications - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Twitter vital to SharePoint success: Evangelists

  Twitter has been integral to the popularity and adoption of SharePoint, according to evangelists of Microsoft's collaboration, file-sharing and Web publishing suite.
  

• Does Facebook change the messaging landscape?

  Facebook recently announced a messaging product that promises seamless messaging, conversation history and a social in-box, nothing short of a new way to communicate, regardless of the channel —SMS, e-mail, IM or chat. The Social Inbox will only contain messages from Friends and Friends of Friends, with other messages being routed to the 'Other' Folder.

• Cisco fights for 'fair share of SMB pie' with unified communications gear

  NEW ORLEANS -- Cisco this week unveiled two unified communications products optimized for small and midsize businesses, a market Cisco admits it needs to increase share in.

• Google apologizes for Gmail bug that shook 150,000 users

  Google says it is "very sorry" for a Gmail software bug that reset some 150,000 accounts and left their owners contemplating the prospect of having lost years worth of data. The outage affected only a fraction of one per cent of Gmail users, but its severity was particularly noteworthy.

• Marist College unifies admin, moves to SharePoint

  The need to move from a siloed environment to a unified administrative system drove Michael Plenty, ICT manager at Marist College in Canberra, to deploy SharePoint in a matter of months.

• RealNetworks founder starts Facebook video chat service

  The founder of RealNetworks has launched a new social video service that connects with Facebook and lets users chat with multiple friends at once.

• Polycom appoints new CIO

  Unified communications (UC) company has appointed Ari Bose as senior vice-president and chief information officer, with global responsibility for the vendor’s IT organisation and strategic transformation.

• Internet, Facebook blackout hits Algeria as protests gain strength

  Reports out of Algeria say the North African country has shut down Internet access and eliminated Facebook accounts as pro-democracy protesters seek to topple the government much as Egyptians did in their nation this week.

• Austar CIO promoted, leaves Australian operations

  CIO of Austar, Dean Walters, will leave the top job after being poached by parent company Liberty Global where he will begin work as CIO for its European broadband operations.

• Amazon cloud now can send bulk e-mail

  Amazon's cloud is adding a service for sending bulk e-mail, saying it will eliminate the burden of "building large-scale e-mail solutions to send marketing and transactional messages."

• Treasury cashes in PABX for VoIP system

  The Australian Government Treasury will soon be replacing its ageing private automatic branch exchange (PABX) system with voice over internet protocol (VoIP).

• BT plans growth with new showcase, cloud services

  British Telecommunications has opened a customer showcase in Sydney in an effort to woo more enterprises to its new cloud infrastructure and services portfolio as the company celebrates 25 years in Australia.

• Facebook movie "The Social Network" cleans up at Golden Globes

  "The Social Network," the blockbuster film based on the story of the Faceback social media site, made the 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony absolutely geeky this year by winning four major categories.

• Vidyo to show off mobile-to-mobile videoconferencing at CES

  Vidyo will demonstrate today an Internet videoconference among six types of mobile devices made by multiple manufacturers in an effort to show how flexible its core VidyoConferencing platform can be for creating business meetings among personal devices.

• Cisco unveils Internet TV and more at CES

  Cisco this week unveiled a suite of video products designed to combine digital TV, online content, social media and other communications applications into an all-inclusive home and mobile video session.