TMCnet Unified Communications Week in Review

From new products to new deployments to meet business needs, this edition of Unified Communications (News - Alert) week in review brings many exciting new developments in the UC space.

Kicking off the week, ConnectSolutions, a provider of communication, conferencing, and collaboration solutions, announced the launch of its unified communication (UC) solution comprising the UC3 platform and Orion services for large enterprise and government agencies.

The UC3 Platform and Orion Services are designed to offer Adobe Connect, Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync and other UC applications to address client's specific needs.

Building on its expertise in unified communications (UC), networking giant Cisco (News - Alert) this week released video enhanced enterprise grade IP phone systems for midsize businesses. In fact, Cisco said that innovations and new features have been added to the existing UC manager business edition 3000 and 6000 to create new Cisco Business Editions 3000 and 6000.

Cisco said that through these innovations, midsize customers can now access collaboration offerings, ranging from rich video to instant messaging (IM) to presence, at price points attractive to the cost-sensitive market. Additionally, these solutions are simple to use, configure and support, said the maker.

In education news, TMCnet reported the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) selected INX (News - Alert) to deploy a Cisco-centric unified communications solution. INX is a U.S. provider of IP based unified communications and data center/cloud infrastructure solutions for enterprise organizations.

Looking to drive the deployment of a Cisco Unified Communications product that will include telephony, voicemail and contact center features customized to meet OHSU specific business needs, OHSU chose INX as their integration partner. To support the communications needs of its more than 13,500 employees across 450 business units, OHSU will use the Cisco-based solution, the company has announced in a press release.

Finally, Polycom (News - Alert) announced its innovative whiteboard solution, the UC Board, which allows existing video display screens and mobile devices to be leveraged by meeting participants as interactive whiteboards for video collaboration. Communication and collaboration in video conferences is therefore improved. Polycom is a top global company in standards-based unified communications or UC.

Teamwork and participation using the traditional whiteboard are undermined during a video conference as whiteboard content is not easily visible to remote participants. Company officials said a simple, elegant and cost-effective solution is now available with the Polycom UC Board. For the first time, video collaboration and whiteboard technology have been integrated with this solution. With a compact design for portability, the solution combines a plug-and-play receiver and stylus for ease-of-use.

For more Unified Communications news, be sure to visit TMCnet again next week.