OCS “14″ Partner solutions announced at VoiceCon
A number of partners have announced solutions aimed at the forthcoming version of Office Communications Server “14″, watch this space for more announcements being made at VoiceCon.
Taken from The Microsoft Unified Communications Blog:
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
Source: here
