Category: Unified Communications
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UC Strategies podcasts with Mitel executives about unified communications, Microsoft, Sun, HP and more…
Continue Reading: UC Strategies podcasts with Mitel executives about unified communications, Microsoft, Sun, HP and more…Back at our Mitel Forum event in late June, analyst Blair Pleasant from Unified Communications Strategies recorded a couple of podcasts[1] with Mitel executives and I’ve been meaning to write about them here. (Full Disclosure: While Mitel has no direct connection to this blog, I do work for Mitel.)
First up, Blair interviewed Mitel CEO Don Smith. They discussed Mitel’s view of unified communications, business process improvement, the use of SIP and XML interfaces and much more. Don discussed the importance of presence and availability, the need for “in the moment” communication and the importance of “presence everywhere”. He also offers his view of the greatest challenges facing Mitel and the industry in the time ahead and his view of where Mitel is heading.
Second, Blair interviewed Stephen Beamish, Mitel VP of Business Development and Strategic Alliances about the partnerships Mitel has with Microsoft, HP and Sun. Given the announcement before Mitel Forum of the partnership with Sun, this interview gives one of the first views into the Mitel-Sun relationship. Blair and Stephen also, of course, discuss Mitel’s relationship with Microsoft, especially in light of the Microsoft-Nortel relationship as well as Microsoft’s other partners. Stephen also talks about the…
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Heading out to VoiceCon, Aug 20-23 in San Francisco. Will you be there?
Continue Reading: Heading out to VoiceCon, Aug 20-23 in San Francisco. Will you be there?If any of you reading this will be attending VoiceCon out in San Francisco, August 20-23, please do drop me a note. I’ll be there from August 20-22 and am looking forward to connecting with a range of people from around the industry.
FYI, if you are a Facebook user and are attending, there is a Facebook event for VoiceCon to which you can add yourself to facilitate networking with other FB users at the show.
Technorati tags: voicecon, voip -
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CRN: "The Coming VoIP War" (between Microsoft and Cisco)
Continue Reading: CRN: "The Coming VoIP War" (between Microsoft and Cisco)Is “the coming VoIP war” to be fought out between Microsoft and Cisco? So asks a column “The Coming VoIP War” by Larry Hooper in today’s issue of CRN. On one level, the debate isn’t as interesting to me as the venue… “CRN” is “Computer Reseller News” and has been around the industry for many years.[1] At various times I’ve personally had a subscription to the print version or at least had it around the office to read.[2] Supported by advertising and theoretically sent to a targeted profile of subscribers, I’ve always seen it as one of the more “established’ newsmagazines of the information technology space… and one obviously targeted at resellers of such technology. So to me it is interesting that the question is being discussed within CRN’s print and web pages.
As to the larger question of whether “the coming VoIP war” will be between Microsoft and Cisco, one can’t ignore that these two companies are giants in the overall IT industry with extremely significant resources and yes, the point is valid that as the interests of the two companies have converged in this merger of communication that many call “unified communications”, they are now definitely going to be competing…
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Mitel connects directly to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 via SIP
Continue Reading: Mitel connects directly to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 via SIPIn my incredibly long queue of things I’ve wanted to write about for the past few weeks, one item was the Mitel news release about making a direct SIP connection to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging. The cool part is that you can just use our basic 3300 ICP communications platform (or IP-PBX, or whatever you want to call it) and connect it directly into a Microsoft Exchange Server to use the Exchange Server for a unified inbox (email, voicemail, fax, etc.). No other boxes or gateways necessary. Just a nice, standard SIP trunk. As a long-time proponent of open standards and general “standards geek”, it really can’t get much better. It’s great to see.
Technorati tags: mitel, microsoft, exchange, voip -
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Rich Tehrani hops on the Mitel "Presence" tour bus… at least for a day…
Continue Reading: Rich Tehrani hops on the Mitel "Presence" tour bus… at least for a day…Scanning RSS feeds early this morning, I was pleased to see that Rich Tehrani will be speaking at our “Presence 2007” event in Costa Mesa, CA, today. I’ve known the tour was going on, but wasn’t tracking who was speaking at the various stops. Glad to see Rich there… I’m sure he’ll give a great talk for whoever attends. The good news for Rich, too, is that at least he was flying out of the New York area yesterday instead of the day before when the glorious storm played havoc with air travel all over the northeast.
Technorati tags: mitel, presence, rich tehrani, sip, unified communications -
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Skype’s persistent group chats as a technical support vehicle
Continue Reading: Skype’s persistent group chats as a technical support vehicleForget email, post your support questions to a group chat! Continuing my experimentation with Skype 3.0, I have to say that the persistent group chats are an intriguing aspect of the product. Back when the 3.0 beta was announced last fall, I joined the “Skype English Blog Chat” and the interesting fact is… I’m still in there a couple of months later. Now, the reason that I am still in there is because I never went to the top of the chat window (pictured on the right – click for a larger view) and clicked the “Leave” button. Because I haven’t pressed “Leave”, I will stay in this group chat indefinitely (or until a Host kicks me out, as Jaanus has indicated he is now doing to inactive members). This group chat membership survives through shutting down Skype, power cycling your computer, etc. In fact, it becomes part of your Skype configuration, so even if you login to Skype on a different PC, the group chat is available to you.
Two other interesting aspects. First, when you return to the group chat, the history of the chat is available to you. So you might be gone from it for several…
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Cisco’s web conferencing to support Jabber clients
Continue Reading: Cisco’s web conferencing to support Jabber clientsAs the IM protocol wars continue with AOL, MSN/WLM, Yahoo, etc. all just now starting to actually allow interconnection between their competing IM systems, I have to confess to always having been a personal fan of Jabber and it’s XMPP protocol. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s got an open source side to it. Maybe that it’s XML based. Maybe it’s just that I liked that anyone could set up a server and start using it. In any event, I’ve always been a huge fan (and generally have Psi running with a Jabber ID of dyork@jabber.org).
So with that in mind I was pleased to see the announcement yesterday that Cisco’s Unified MeetingPlace will now support Jabber clients through the Jabber XCP framework. From what I can see of the announcement, Jabber clients will now be able to interoperate with Cisco’s collaboration server. What I’m naturally curious about is to wonder whether this is limited to Jabber’s commercial Jabber Messenger product (through some means) or is XMPP support being baked into Cisco’s product natively, in which case conceiveably any XMPP client could connect to the server. There, are, naturally, many Jabber clients out there (including, interestingly, Google’s GoogleTalk…).
Interesting…
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Alec Saunders: “New Presence and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto” – how do we move to the next level of presence awareness?
Continue Reading: Alec Saunders: “New Presence and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto” – how do we move to the next level of presence awareness?Given that I view “presence” as one of the more potentially disruptive elements of IP telephony, I was pleased to see that over on his blog Alec wrote a very lengthy and insightful piece entitled “‘New Presence’ and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto“. I always enjoy Alec’s writing and this time it’s no different… it’s great when someone can make the time to write a thoughtful piece like this. Since the piece came out, I’ve wanted to write more about it, but I have to suck it up and admit that with everything else I’m trying to close off before the end-of-year tomorrow, a lengthy reply is just not going to happen.
However, some others have offered replies and they, too, are well worth a read:
- Ken Camp: The Absence of Presence (also a lengthy thoughtful piece)
- Brough Turner: Why not call “new presence” availability?
- PhoneBoy: Presence and Identity
All are well worth a read. Thanks again, Alec, for starting a worthy conversation…. hopefully I’ll find the time to chime in soon.
UPDATE: Andy Abramson has also joined in… The Doctor is In: New Presence 2.0 by Alec
Technorati Tags: alec saunders, presence, voice 2.0
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