Unified communications infrastructure virtualization now a reality

Unified communications vendors are starting to introduce unified communications (UC) infrastructures that can be deployed via server virtualization, reducing capital outlays and management overhead for enterprises with limited resources.

Last month, Avaya introduced Avaya Aura System Platform, a virtualized server that runs multiple Avaya Aura unified communications applications on a single server. In the past, Avaya sold each individual element of its unified communications infrastructure on a single dedicated box. Mitel announced last June that it was working with VMware to produce “VMware Ready” versions of its unified communications products. Alcatel-Lucent has had its Business integrated Communications Solution (BiCS) product on the market for a couple of years.

Avaya’s product limits enterprises to deploying only Avaya products on an Avaya-branded server. Mitel and Alcatel’s products allow customers to deploy their unified communications products on any industry-standard server and run them concurrently on a virtualized server with other non-Mitel virtualized applications.

Virtualized unified communications infrastructures offer several advantages to enterprises, according to Rob Arnold, senior analyst for enterprise communications at Current Analysis.  More >>

Microsoft Office Communication Server

Office Communications Server 2007 combines software-powered VoIP with open standards to make the telephone an intuitive, menu-based part of the computing experience. This unified communications philosophy extends from the organization of the underlying call routing, which includes features like least-cost routing and extension-based digit dialing, as well as integration features that bridge the VoIP standards supported by Office Communications Server 2007 with implementations that use older standards.

At the center of this integration is the Mediation Server role of Office Communications Server 2007. It provides a single interface and uses open-standard SIP for signaling interoperability. Mediation Server takes calls from third-party IP-PBX systems or SIP/PSTN Gateways and moves them onto the network using the adaptive codec, remote user, and security models that are the basis for call setup and media with Office Communications Server 2007.

There are several ways, in which you can integrate Office Communications Server 2007 with your existing PBX environment. Two primary scenarios are “co-existence” and “standalone.” Each is based on the use of the Office Communicator 2007 client with a user ’s PBX phone and the corporate telephony infrastructure.

For more details please visit :  http://www.techland.co.uk/Solutions/IP_Telephony/MS_OCS.aspx

Avocent – KVM over IP

Techland provides KVM switches, KVM externder, Digital KVM Switches for offices and business to business organisations.

DSR Series

DSR® KVM over IP switches provide BIOS-level control of all connected servers and serial-based devices in your data center. DSR switches let you remotely manage and power cycle connected devices, and helps keep business running as usual when the network is down by providing external modem support. DSR switches feature an on-board Web interface for convenient access and control of your servers over IP.

Cyclades® OnSite branch office appliances

The Cyclades® OnSite branch office appliance is compact, multi-functional and offers a secure, single point of entry for managing servers and network equipment co-located at remote sites. Devices connected to the Cyclades OnSite appliance can be centrally managed through DSView® 3 management software, thereby minimizing the number of tools needed to manage remote appliances.

AutoView Digital KVM Switches

The AutoView® 3100 and AutoView® 3200 digital KVM switches provide access to your servers from any location via an on-board Web browser. Designed for the needs of small to medium-size businesses, the switches also include an analog port for local access – so whether your IT experts are on-site or remote, they’ll have the tools they need to maintain the 24/7 availability of your servers.

HMX™ Desktop over IP

HMX Desktop over IP solutions extend your desktop any distance over the LAN over a single TCP/IP connection without compromising the desktop experience. HMX Desktop over IP gives administrators simplified provisioning, security and reliability, and provides end users with real-time, high-quality computer experience based on their individual needs. Utilize HMX Manager for management from a central console and features centralized authentication for secure access, logging and reporting for all system users, and desktop pooling.

SwitchView IP

The Avocent SwitchView® IP 1020 remote access device features an on-board Web interface that gives small to medium-size businesses convenient, secure, browser-based access to existing KVM switches and servers.

AltiGen IP PBX phone systems

Selecting a phone system is one of the most important decisions facing businesses today. It will not only determine a company’s ability to leverage the applications and technology currently supporting their business, it also determines the complexity and cost of implementing new technologies in the future.

IP PBX Telephone System

Traditional telephone systems have become obsolete with the convergence of voice and data and Voice over IP. AltiGen’s IP PBX phone systems provide a communications foundation designed to improve the way you communicate today, with the flexibility to easily add more advanced capabilities as your business needs change.

Benefits of AltiGen’s VoIP Technology

• Concurrent support for legacy analog telephones and newer VoIP phones.
• Easier Extension and multi-site administration.
• More features and information available on VoIP phones vs. traditional phones
• Consolidated infrastructure requirements resulting from the use of existing data networks.
• Unified corporate appearance over multiple locations.
• Reduced long distance toll charges through Voice over IP trunking.

AltiGen’s all-in-one IP PBX phone systems include standard PBX functionality, a comprehensive voice mail system, call detail reporting, call recording on demand, and an advanced auto attendant. The system is easily scaled in both size and capability.

For Services & Solutions visit:  http://www.techland.co.uk/File/Altigen_IPPBX.aspx

Unified Communications on the move

Unified Communications is the descendant of desktop-bound, single in-box unified messaging systems of the 1990s. UC adds to the mix Presence technology that enables you to determine what everyone in your organization is doing (On the phone? In a meeting? Out to lunch? Just plain busy?). UC also is increasingly becoming “Mobile UC”, a vital part of the toolkit of every road warrior who must now survive by foraging the business landscape. Soon social networking tools will also become a major interface to UC communications solutions.

Most heartening is the fact that unified communications vendors are themselves using UC internally.

An Unified Communications  company develops and markets edgeBOX, a multi-service gateway they call “the first Unified Communications Appliance” and “Office-in-a-Box” that provides all the vital voice and data communication services required by Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs), branch offices, remote workers and telecommuters with the same voice, data and IT capabilities in an office system so as to increase productivity.

The edgeBOX can replace at least six separate devices that would normally handle VoIP/IP-PBX, VPNs, security, NAC, QoS,WiFi ( News – Alert) access, as well as a fax server, web server, email server, print server and data storage. It’s available on hardware platforms that support up to 300 users, with different form factors and a broadband interfaces such as BRI/PRI (T1/E1), FX0/FXS, Ethernet, etc.

VOIP Services- New era of Communication

VoIP services offer an assortment of flexible features which makes it the ideal choice of many. From small-to-large scale companies dealing in different services to residentials’, everyone can migrate to IP telephony to enhance the way they communicate and network.

It is no unknown fact that for corporates networking is a bare essential element in order to expand their services and to function smoothly. online certificate courses contemporary times, there is a shift in the way people, especially the business houses communicate. Long distance and international calls have become more or less a necessity and this directly leads to a sharp increase in the monthly telephony bills.

In such a scenario, it becomes critical to rely on a cheaper and yet qualitative mode of communication in order to cut down on the cost of telephone bills. VoIP does precisely that for its users.

VoIP call termination service assists its users to make local, long distance and ISD calls at almost half the rate as compared to PSTN service. It works on circuit package system wherein it sends voice compressed in the form online certificate courses much like the way emails are sent, over the Internet. Since it relies solely on the World Wide Web for call transmission, the cost of operations also is cut down tremendously.

Another feature which makes the best VoIP service as the trusted choice of many is its mobility. You can connect to the rest of the world from any network across the globe, through the same telephony number as allotted to you by your VoIP phone service provider. For instance, gourmet chocolate can be on a business trip to some other country and you need to contact your head office. All you need to do is connect to the internet and voila! You are ready to make the call at the same call tariff as offered to you by your provider (which will be cheaper than PSTN). It’s synonymous to taking your business along with you wherever you go! So forget about missing important phone call forever!

VoIP over IP service is beneficial for those organizations too who have a host of mobile or road workers working for them. For them the telephony bills have always been an issue since their workers would need to call the company accredited online universities would in turn be charged high call tariff for it. VoIP has changed this. Now mobile workers can be given IP telephones through which they can contact their office free of cost! Imagine the reduction in cost of calls just by this one service!

Additionally, all the branches of an organization, even the ones in different countries can be connected via voice over IP termination service at no extra cost. gourmet chocolate you can make and receive calls and even initiate conference calls between various branches absolutely free of cost. No paying for local or ISD charges when you want to contact your branch or head office.

Unified Communications vs Unified Messaging

Many people still confuse unified communications with unified messaging (UM), which appeared in the computer telephony era of the 1990s. Unified messaging systems collect emails, voicemails and faxes and place them in a single “inbox” accessed periodically on the desktop by an end user.

First of all, UC can call upon more types of communications than UM: instant messaging, telephony, video, email, voicemail, and short message services, whiteboarding and so forth. Unlike UM, UC eliminates “latency” by emphasizing real-time delivery of communications. This is made possible via an expanded form of the concept of “presence”, which doesn’t exist at all in UM. A simple example of presence is the instant messaging “buddy list” which indicates whether a person is available for a chat. UC systems use more sophisticated forms of presence so that real-time communications can occur based on a preferred method, personal schedule, available device and recipient location. Moreover, in contact center scenarios, “presence” also includes a person’s skill-set so that a contact center agent can call upon the expertise of an individual somewhere in the company (or somewhere in the world) so as to achieve firstcall resolution and customer satisfaction.
Finally, unlike UM which is relegated to the desktop, unified communications is increasingly associated with mobility and Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC). IP PBX functionality can be extended to mobile devices, and dual-mode phones allow for seamless transitions between WiFi and cellular services. Indeed, some experts say that we should use a new term, Mobile Unified Communications.

In total, UC brings various forms of communications a person has at their disposal into real time and coordinates them, making it easy for individuals to collaborate and ultimately integrating communication functions directly with business applications; Gartner calls this capability “communications-enabled business processes”, with a workflow or process application automatically identifying an appropriate resource at the point in the business activity where one is needed.

Providers of unified communications platforms and services are focusing more effort and attention on developing and marketing applications that target specific enterprise user needs
Unified Communications applications:

• Fixed/mobile convergence and collaboration are two of the most popular UC applications today.
• Rich media with HD audio and video is one of the “hot” applications expected to pick up speed over the next 12 to 18 months.

Keep these characteristics in mind when shopping for a (hopefully) genuine unified communications system. Otherwise you may just end up with an IP PBX having a lot of features.

Email Archiving and Email Compliance

Email archiving is a stand-alone IT application that works with an email server to help manage an organization’s email messages. It captures and preserves all email traffic flowing into and out of the email server so it can be accessed quickly at a later date from a centrally managed location. When the need arises to search historical email for internal investigations or for a court-ordered legal discovery, organizations can search thousands of email records in seconds using search tools embedded in the email archiving system.

There are email archiving applications to support email messaging systems, and they can be installed in-house or can perform as a hosted service. In addition to email and attachments, some email archiving applications also archive all aspects of a mailbox including public folders, offline PST files, calendars, contacts, notes, and associated metadata and context. Email archiving can also enable applications for end-user search, data protection, disaster recovery, eDiscovery, and compliance supervision.

Email archiving applications capture email content on magnetic disk storage in one of two methods. One method is to capture email directly from the email application itself. (e.g. Microsoft Exchange, IBM Notes, Novell GroupWise, Sendmail, Imail). The alternative method captures email content during transport via an agent installed at network gateway.

There are multiple reasons why organizations implement email archiving:

• To enable email users who send and receive hundreds of email messages each day to have unlimited mailbox capacity and fingertip access to years’ worth of email
• To offload data from the production email server for increased performance and storage efficiency while preserving access to end users
• To meet litigation, regulatory, and/or business records retention requirements by enabling compliance and legal officers to easily search email stored in the archive

At a high level though there are two key approaches to using EAM (E-mail Archiving and Management) technology:

• As a part of your messaging infrastructure and storage activities • As an essential compliance and legal business application

Both approaches can be complex, and in some cases, may be industry-specific. Law firms, for example, use EAM technology very differently than manufacturing companies. Furthermore, individual enterprises have unique needs.