Unified Communications News & Articles

Today at its Collaboration Summit 2011 in Miami, Cisco unveils updates to its unified communications platform Jabber and its web conferencing platform Webex that will enhance enterprise collaboration and let people work anytime, and from anywhere.

Microsoft's Skype is pretty much everywhere in the computing space, but that's clearly not enough. Expect to see Skype in all kinds of other gadgets and electronic goods with the advent of SkypeKit which also boosts desktop application integration.

The way you work is about to change. This past January, we introduced you to tibbr, an enterprise collaboration platform that is intended to make people, processes and systems work better and more efficiently. Today, tibbr 3.0 has been launched. While it may have been only four months between 1.0 and 3.0, the new version is chock-full of new features. Taken separately, each new feature is remarkable. Combined, they become a relevant, transformative platform for the enterprise.

As the race for VoIP and unified communications heats up, Salesforce (news, site) leaps into action and picks up VSee.

 Yahoo (news, site) drags its email product out of beta, giving users a better social interface and the option to move big files around.

Telligent (news, site) is social software built on the Microsoft platform. So it only makes sense they integrate some of Microsoft's key products with their platform. In February, we saw integration with SharePoint 2010. Now we see the next connector out in beta: Telligent Connect for Microsoft LyncBETA.

Having launched offering HD Voice, Viber (news, site) gets even more vibe in V2.0 with free texts and other improvements.

On the last morning of info360, Mike Gotta, Sr. Technology Solutions Manager at Cisco, spoke about The Social Graph: People, Information and Communities. Because the rise of social technologies and tools has made us look at the world through the lens of people and the relationship to one another, it doesn’t make content irrelevant. In fact, it creates a challenge for integrating content into the community.

Unified communications experts generally see Skype (news, site) as more a consumer service than an enterprise-level solution, yet Skype continues to court the world of business with a number of professional features and the recent partnership with Avaya. In case you've been sleeping on the news, here's a quick look at how the platform can help out at the work place: 

It appears Google Voice is gearing up for a mainstream year. For just a few hours between last night and this morning, the Internet giant previewed a feature that's certain to piss off mobile carriers in a big way: number portability.  

As business confidence in the Asia Pacific region continues improving through 2011, the market for enterprise communications and collaboration services sees great potential. Business organizations expect to grow into the double digits, and will require services that will help bolster this growth. However, firms are advised to have clear investment plans and avoid unnecessary spending and increased exposure to risks.

Happy Monday and welcome to the rumor mill. Over the weekend, Skype (news, site) news suggested the popular VoIP service was gearing up to release some new Web-based products. Today we’ve additional details, including when you can probably expect them and integrations to look out for.

Not satisfied with dominating social networks, Facebook (news, site) is now going after the major email services.

eDiscovery and records management have certainly evolved. What started with emails and electronic documents has spread into the cloud and then some. And now, just as predicted, it’s taking on social media.

German developer Open-Xchange has teamed up with Romanian outfit Rack-Soft. The combination of both companies' products offer a total communication solution with telephone, fax, instant messaging integrated with e-mail, contacts, calendar and task information.

Did they miss anything -- perhaps a psychic hotline?

With unified communications picking up a lot of press as companies try to keep their employees in contact via the most suitable means, competition is increasing for the major players like Cisco.

Smaller outfits will increasingly group together as these two have done. The combined package is available as an on-premise or as-a-service and they have worked with SaaS expert Parallels to simplify deployment for new users.

Rack-Soft brings its hosted PBX and the latest version of VoipNow (2.0.3), which has just added local time zone support to make handling international calls easier, while Open-Xchange provides the e-mail and collaboration components. 

Open-Xchange offers an AJAX e-mail app.

With Open-Xchange's Community Edition available free for non-commercial use, a trial version and a range of Appliance, Server and Hosting editions, there's bound to be something for everyone.