unified communications - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Kitchen appliance seller goes Asterisk for UC roll-out

  Melbourne-based kitchen and whitegoods distributor, Andi-Co, has deployed an Asterisk-based IP-PABX for a unified communications solution.

• Microsoft launches unified comms client for Nokia phones

  Nokia and Microsoft on Wednesday announced the availability of Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia, a unified communications client for Nokia's Eseries smartphones. The software is the first result of the partnership they announced in August last year.

• Interop: Avaya CEO touts lasting impact of SIP

  Session Initiation Protocol will remain the driver of innovation in unified communications for the next decade, putting it on par with TCP/IP as a networking game changer, Avaya's CEO told an overflow crowd at his Interop keynote address Tuesday.

• Ringio aims to bring big phone features to small business

  A software-based phone system launched Monday aims to give small businesses many features of advanced call-center software and soon will work with Salesforce.com and other CRM platforms, according to startup Ringio.

• Microsoft to update communications server

  Microsoft plans to release a new version of its Office Communications Server (OCS) by the latter half of 2010, according to Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Unified Communications Group.

• Vendors ally with Microsoft at Voicecon

  At Voicecon's opening Monday in Orlando, vendors are poised to push unified communications, and Microsoft is stepping into the spotlight by announcing alliances with other vendors whose gear interoperates with Microsoft Office Communications Server.

• Vic govt deploys video accessibility service

  Geelong Hospital in Victoria has launched the state’s first video relay interpreting (VRI) service aimed at providing hearing impaired people better access to interpreter services, particularly with health care.

• Cisco tries to expand video calling with IME

  Cisco Systems plans to extend unified communications beyond individual enterprises, introducing a new appliance and a protocol that the company hopes will become an industry standard.

• Avaya lays out Nortel migration road map

  Avaya tomorrow will reveal a road map that shows how its customers – in particular its newly minted Nortel customers - can move to unified communications technologies without ripping out existing gear.

• Austar tunes UC for better customer service

  With around 750,000 customers and 3 million calls a year, pay TV provider Austar has improved its customer service through unified communications by reducing average call handling times by 15 per cent.

• Cisco's Chambers demonstrates home TelePresence

  Cisco Systems Chairman and CEO John Chambers demonstrated on Wednesday how the company's TelePresence videoconferencing technology could be developed into a consumer product, showing off the long-awaited system at a press conference ahead of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

• Google relaxes single phone number requirement for Voice

  To take advantage of Google Voice's telephony management features, users have had to fulfill a tricky requirement: convince their contacts to call them using the single "phone number for life" that comes with this free online service.

• Google Wave: It's innovative, but is it truly useful?

  Google Wave is a groundbreaking real-time collaborative tool that has the potential to be an ideal way for members of a group to work with one another. But it's not clear how useful it will be in the real world. It's the kind of tool that you want to use, but one that you may not be able to figure out how to fit into your work life.

• Cisco patches a dozen router bugs

  Cisco Systems has released its twice-yearly set of security patches for its router firmware, fixing 12 security flaws in the products.

• HP builds collaboration tool into workstations

  Hewlett-Packard is building collaboration software with video, application-sharing and 3-D graphics support into several of its workstation models, giving the high-definition conferencing market an option well below the cost and scale of telepresence.