Partners announce solutions to complement Microsoft Communications Server “14”

Many of our partners announced new solutions for Microsoft Communications Server “14” at VoiceCon Orlando this week, demonstrating both the maturity of our partner ecosystem and industry support for our Unified Communications vision.

Customers benefit from the investments and innovation of multiple partners in our open, horizontal ecosystem, and have the flexibility to select the partner products that best meet their specific communications solution needs. This includes industry standard servers, telephony gateways, and both IP Phone and USB endpoints.

Here are some highlights of the new partner solutions that support Microsoft Communications Server “14”:

Survivable branch appliances

AudioCodes, Dialogic, Ferrari electronic AG, HP, and NET announced survivable branch appliance products that provide local telephony services for remote offices in the event of a wide area network failure. These products include integrated PSTN gateway functionality with a variety of densities and interface types, and, like other third party gateways, will be qualified via the Microsoft Unified Communications Open Interoperability Program. The Open Interoperability Program is intended to help ensure that customers have seamless experiences with the setup, support, and use of a variety of third party products and services with Communications Server.

IP phones

Aastra and Polycom introduced IP phones optimized for Microsoft Communicator “14.” Customers can now choose common area and information worker phones from both vendors, and conference room phones from Polycom. Several of the products integrate with Communicator “14” via a simple USB connection to provide streamlined setup, multimedia calling, and desktop control of the phone. Customers can also take advantage of existing IP, USB, and PC products offered by Polycom, ClearOne, Plantronics, Jabra, Logitech, Microsoft, HP, Lenovo, and others. These “optimized” endpoints offer a high quality user experience and “just works” installation in a wide variety of form factors and price points.

Enhanced 9-1-1 call routing services

911 Enable and Intrado announced their plans to provide North American customers with routing services for emergency calls. These services, together with Communications Server “14,” will provide customers with an innovative, flexible, and cost effective Enhanced 9-1-1 solution.

New contact center and call accounting and recording solutions.

Aspect Unified IP and Aspect eWorkforce Management enhance first call resolution, provide additional contact channels, and easily schedule experts to manage customer inquiries. Quest MessageStats, a message reporting and analysis tool, provides detailed usage information and internal reporting for billing and chargeback purposes through a single interface. In addition, Nice Systems SmartCenter allows Microsoft Communications Server “14” customers to benefit from real-time, cross-channel interaction analytics to impact customer interactions as they occur and use insights gained to improve their organization’s business performance.

Many of these partners are attending VoiceCon Orlando. Visit their booths to learn more.

Kristin Murray

Partner Team, Unified Communications

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Kristin, come see Aastra, AudioCodes, NET and 911 Enable along with FaceTime, GreenAppX, Uncommon Solutions, snom, FaxCore, Novus, Gold Systems @ OCS Forum, now MCS Forum Expo.  Appreciate your support in helping promote MCS. Cheers, Tom Cross