RoundTable Changes Hands
Many of you may have heard this already: the Microsoft Roundtable is now the Polycom CX5000. All production, support, etc is now handed over to Polycom. I’m reading this as a signal for the months to come: MS will not be looking to get into the hardware game at all. The less hardware the better for them, I guess. This is obviously going to continue to be a major distinction from Avaya, Cisco etc.
OCS Endpoints from SNOM
The SNOM phones that are "OCS Ready" are actually pretty cool. They use a registration/configuration server to map users to phones. The configuration service resides outside of OCS and must be populated by an administrator with users/phones. (UPDATE – comment from Oliver mentions you don’t need the config server. I should have been more clear – you can configure phones individually, but for bulk admin/deploy using a central service seemed like the right way to go. But the guys on the floor did show me that you didn’t have to use the config services.)
It’s pretty good – it’s just how most IP PBXs work. The bad news (sort of) is that MS isn’t really fully behind SNOM’s approach – by that I mean they don’t support the phones. SNOM does, which is good, but MS is clear that it’s not on par with the Tanjay or any of the USB devices listed in the supported devices page.
SIP Trunking
I talked to the Sprint guys about their SIP trunking service, which allows direct connection into OCS without the use of PRIs / VoiceGateways. Along with Global Crossing, Sprint is the only provider in the US offering SIP trunking directly to OCS. I will draw up a comparison matrix between the two, but I’ll just say for now – Sprint’s service isn’t available until summer, is domestic only, and no tollfree service (yet). Interesting to note: Sprint, like GC, is touting their internal deployment of OCS R2.
Aspect Contact Center
Aspect was demoing their new OCS-integrated contact center. They’ve really just added a bit of a plugin to the existing contact center product to allow transfers over to non Aspect agents. It’s not a bad way to go, but I’ll be interested to see the OCS integration become a little tighter in the next revisions
Cisco Telepresence
Cisco has a newer telepresence product that is designed for 3 people, can be put in any conference room. It only (only!) requires a 5MB dedicated connection. I hate to call it lower-end telepresence because it’s not. But it’s a scaled-down version of the full-blown telepresence. It looked really nice.
