New ShoreGear Family of V Switches helps ensure access to business-critical voicemail applications in the event of WAN failure

SUNNYVALE, CA, January 22, 2009 - ShoreTel, Inc., (NASDAQ: SHOR), a leading provider of Pure IP Unified Communications (UC) solutions, has unveiled a new family of ShoreGear® Voice Switches that extends the company's unique single-image distributed architecture to voicemail and auto-attendant applications. By integrating support for these capabilities into its switches, ShoreTel expands its leadership in the UC industry by reducing the cost and complexity of deploying a highly reliable and robust voicemail and auto-attendant system across multiple locations. With the ShoreGear 50V, ShoreGear 90V and ShoreGear 90BRIV switches, organizations can ensure local access to voicemail even in the event of WAN downtime.

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

• ShoreTel continues to extend the capabilities of its distributed and robust communications platform, making UC easier, more reliable, and more cost-effective to deploy.
• More Flexibility: The ShoreGear family of V switches gives our companies greater flexibility to deploy reliable voicemail services at their branch offices by simply equipping the office with the new switch.
• Improved Reliability: The ShoreGear family of V switches stores voicemail messages on highly reliable Compact Flash Card technology, offering superior reliability over traditional disk drives.
• Small Footprint: To conserve space in the data center, the ShoreGear V switches are packaged in 1U half-width chassis and occupy no more rack space than the ShoreGear 50, 90 and 90BRI models.

FEATURES

For a detailed description and list of features for all ShoreGear switches click here.

• The ShoreGear 50V switch supports up to 50 IP telephones, two analog extensions and four loop-start trunks. It also supports 50 voicemail boxes with 22 hours of voicemail storage.
• The ShoreGear 90V switch supports up to 90 IP telephones, four analog extensions and eight loop-start trunks. It also supports 90 voicemail boxes with 56 hours of voicemail storage.
• The ShoreGear 90BRIV switch supports up to 90 IP phones, four analog extensions, and four BRI ports (eight channels). It also supports 90 voicemail boxes with 56 hours of voicemail storage.

QUOTES

"Voicemail is an essential component of business-critical communications and, as such, it is one of the key pillars of a unified communications platform. For today's workers, voicemail is a crucial business tool that must be accessible anytime, and from anywhere. By integrating voicemail into a distributed architecture through the new ShoreGear V switches, ShoreTel has made it possible for companies to cost-effectively increase the reliability and accessibility of their voicemail, leading to greater productivity and improved customer service."

- Kevin Gavin, vice president of marketing, ShoreTel

For detailed information on ShoreTel products and features, click here.

Credit: Marketwire.com

ORLANDO, FL--(Marketwire - January 19, 2009) - LOTUSPHERE -- ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), a leading
provider of Pure IP Unified Communications (UC) solutions, today announced
that it has begun field trials of the ShoreTel plug-in for IBM Lotus
Sametime.

ShoreTel announced in March 2008 it was working with IBM to integrate
technologies that allow customers to access ShoreTel's powerful IP
telephony features from within their Lotus Sametime application. Customers
interested in leveraging this integration can now apply to participate in
the field trial by sending an email to fieldtrials@shoretel.com.

The ShoreTel plug-in includes call control and management features of
ShoreTel's award-winning ShoreWare Call Manager end-user application suite.
With the plug-in for Lotus Sametime, companies can integrate voice
capabilities throughout their IBM Lotus collaboration applications,
providing new ways to increase productivity and collaboration without
requiring users to learn a new program or change their habits. The combined
solution is easy to deploy, easy to manage and easy to use, and offers
unmatched reliability. ShoreTel will preview the capabilities of the
plug-in at this year's Lotusphere 2009 conference, January 18-22 at Walt
Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort, Orlando, Fla. in the Foundation lab
and on the exhibit floor in booth #622.

"The ShoreTel plug-in for Lotus Sametime provides customers with more
options for integrating our wide range of unified communications
capabilities with their core business processes to increase employee
productivity and collaboration throughout the enterprise," said Mark Arman,
vice president of business development at ShoreTel. "Our ongoing work with
IBM reflects our deep commitment to delivering the communications
solutions enterprises need to remain competitive, while ensuring an optimal
customer experience."

The ShoreTel plug-in adds the following key capabilities for Lotus Sametime
users:

-- Telephony presence - System users can see when another person on the system is on a call.

-- Click to dial, call by name - Users can easily place a call by selecting a name in the Lotus Sametime or IBM Lotus Notes and Domino directories.

-- Telephony control at a click - Telephony features, such as hold, transfer and conference, become intuitively easy.

-- Integrated call stack - Users can manage multiple calls from within the Lotus Sametime user interface.

You can see the whole press release here. 

 

 

Accent has recently added Samsung as a vendor partner to provide enhanced communication solutions to our customers!

The relationship is brand new and still being developed, but from what I have personally seen from the Samsung solution it will help fill a product void that has existed for a while now.  Accent will mainly use the Samsung product to provide wide area VoIP networking to customers looking to use traditional (TDM) switching locally.

More on this exciting development to come!     

Network World has posted an article about the ShoreTel 8 release that was reported here back in April. The article gives an overview of the new ShoreGear switches and Personal Call Manager software. You can find some of it below and the remainder here.

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

ShoreTel earlier this week announced several software and hardware upgrades and two new voice switches. Included in the announcement are enhancements to the ShoreWare Call Manager product line, more open interfaces for integration, and adds two new voice switches: the ShoreGear 24A and the ShoreGear 30.

The ShoreWare Personal Call Manager has been upgraded to provide more intuitive interfaces. Added features include an integrated client user interface with a main display for calling features and tabs for messages and history; simplified access to features designed to be easier to use and find; quick and easy dialing with exchange and phone directory along with just in time telephony presence; and a simplified, single-level user interface with personal and advanced merged options.

The ShoreWare Professional Call Manager has added improvements to its basic voice communications and it now provides automatic and on-demand video communications. The Instant Messaging interface upgrades include easy sidebar conversations; on the phone communications; and interfaces for a third party presence server. The unified communications suite has added improved call control, video calling and IM access and a rich presence integration; the suite now also supports a softphone

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

Enterprises are starting to use the BlackBerry in a new way: as a means of taking their desk phones mobile.

Research In Motion, known mainly as a mobile e-mail vendor, is making a surprising effort to leverage the voice side of the BlackBerry smartphone, positioning its server software as a way to blend cellular and corporate voice networks by linking the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) with the corporate PBX.

The result is a set of capabilities, achieved without major infrastructure changes, that many enterprises probably will find compelling. They include a single corporate telephone number that rings on a cell phone, an office phone, a business phone at home, or on a BlackBerry, extending PBX features to the BlackBerry. (Compare unified communications products.)

Fayetteville State University (FSU) in North Carolina experienced the power of RIM's Mobile Voice System (MVS) when a key storage-area network suffered a catastrophic failure, says Joseph Vittorelli, the university's director of systems and infrastructure. Within minutes, he connected to every staff member he needed -- regardless of where they were -- via the conference feature, made assignments and got the team working together on very short notice.

FSU, Dell and Chicago-based produce-wholesaler Anthony Morano Co. were panelists at this week's annual BlackBerry user conference, discussing fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) and MVS.

Another change at FSU is that voice mails -- a product of people's inability to connect -- have dropped to zero in many cases. Vittorelli recently got a call from a user who returned from lunch, found she had three voice mails and demanded to know why the calls had not reached her BlackBerry smartphone.

"Enterprises are realizing as they look at fixed-mobile convergence and unified communications that mobility is a big part of this," says David Heit, director of software product management, who focuses on MVS, server software introduced in 2007 and based on a product acquired when RIM bought Ascendent Systems.

MVS links the BES to a large number of PBX brands, forging voice- and call-control links between the BlackBerry cellular world, corporate telecom systems, and an array of carrier-base landline and wireless networks. Users get a new corporate phone number that overlays their cell-phone number. All inbound calls are made to that one number, ring on all of the user's phones, and connect on whichever phone the user answers. "I now have the concepts of call routing and call control [with the BlackBerry devices]," Heit says.

Heit demonstrates on his own BlackBerry, selecting a five-digit corporate extension at a desk in RIM's Waterloo, Ontario, headquarters and pressing a button to connect over AT&T's Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution network. For the first time, the BlackBerry becomes in effect the user's mobile desk phone, not just his mobile e-mail device.

It's all done without wading into what Heit calls the "thick soup" of the complexities of VoIP infrastructure deployments, of FMC architectures, and the like. "The trend to all-IP converged infrastructures will take years," he says.

You can see the whole article here.

Credit: Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet.com

Improved collaboration and connectivity between Windows PCs and cell phones is going to get a major shot in the arm with Windows 7, according to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.

During a speech for members of the Windows Digital Lifestyle Consortium in Tokyo last week, Gates referred a few times to Windows 7, the next version of Windows which Microsoft has said will ship in 2010. Gates highlighted improvements to Windows 7’s lower power and memory requirements that are in the works. But he also played up extensively during his speech the new connectivity between mobile phones and Windows which will be introduced as part of the release.

From a transcript of Gates’ remarks:

“We’re hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I’m very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done, to connect up to the thing being done out on the Internet, so that, for example, if you have two personal computers, that your files automatically are synchronized between them, and so you don’t have a lot of work to move that data back and forth.”

The file synchronization capability to which Gates refers is the Live Mesh collaboration/synchronization platform/service which Microsoft recently unveiled. But Gates made it sound like there’s something beyond Mesh that could be in the works for Windows 7. Again, from the transcript:

“We’re also a participant in building software for the mobile phones, and our proposition is to build a great mobile operating system, but also to have it be the one that connects best to the Windows PCs. So we’re working hard on both of those things…

“For a customer there are going to be phones with larger screens, and PCs with smaller screens. In fact, there will be even an overlap, but I think the key for us is to drive all the applications, and let the user move easily back and forth. Our best customers are going to have a great mobile phone, and they’re going to have a great personal computer. And if we don’t make those scenarios work well together, that will hold back both of those markets.”

Gates also told the audience that Microsoft is going to deliver a “major new version of Windows” every two to three years. (A caveat: Gates also said not too long ago that Microsoft would deliver a new version of Internet Explorer every 9 to 12 months. IE 7 shipped in October 2006; we’re still only at Beta 1 for IE 8.)

What’s your take? What kinds of new features in Windows 7 — and Windows Mobile 7, allegedly due out in 2009 — might improve PC-to-mobile connectivity and what kinds of applications/services would benefit?

Here's an interesting article from TechRepublic blogger Bill Detwiler regarding the price of oil effecting demand for teleworking and the impact on corporate networks. As oil prices rise, businesses will take a harder look at allowing employees to work from home instead of incurring the cost of commuting on a daily basis.

This is an article from Networkworld.com regarding LifeSize Communications.