UC Friday: It's That Time of the YearUC Friday: It's That Time of the Year

Tis the season - no, not Christmas - VoiceCon! This is the time of year when many vendors contact press and analysts to set up briefings, pre-briefings, and pre-pre-briefings about their VoiceCon announcements. I've been involved in several of these pre-briefings over the past couple weeks, and one of the more interesting companies I've heard from is Zeacom. I've been following Zeacom for several years and was always impressed with some of the unique features of their products. I especially like the personalized call greetings functionality - when I call a particular contact there, the system knows it's me calling based on my phone number and plays a greeting recorded by that person just for me, and provides me with the option of having the system try to find that person, leave a voice message, or be transferred to someone else. It's very slick.

Tis the season - no, not Christmas - VoiceCon! This is the time of year when many vendors contact press and analysts to set up briefings, pre-briefings, and pre-pre-briefings about their VoiceCon announcements. I've been involved in several of these pre-briefings over the past couple weeks, and one of the more interesting companies I've heard from is Zeacom. I've been following Zeacom for several years and was always impressed with some of the unique features of their products. I especially like the personalized call greetings functionality - when I call a particular contact there, the system knows it's me calling based on my phone number and plays a greeting recorded by that person just for me, and provides me with the option of having the system try to find that person, leave a voice message, or be transferred to someone else. It's very slick.Zeacom has been offering both contact center and UC solutions for years - even before the term "UC" was used. The company notes that approximately 75% of its 2,500 customers have implemented some aspect of UC. Rather than taking an enterprise product and trying to fit it to the SMB market, Zeacom has developed its products and solutions specifically for SMB customers.

Zeacom's two flagship products, Contact Center and Corus (offering CTI call control, UM, etc.) are based on the same code base but have been marketed as two separate products -until now. With Zeacom Communications Center (ZCC) both products are offered as a single Unified Communications solution, supporting up to 2,500 desktops and 5-500 contact center agents. ZCC brings together Unified Messaging, rich presence, desktop telephony, mobility, contact center, and operator console applications all in the one application. With ZCC, Zeacom discusses the concept of 1+1+1, meaning that there is one appliance, one application and one administrator/reporting environment.

ZCC version 5, the latest version, which is being launched at VoiceCon, introduces new sets of UC features, including Microsoft OCS interoperability to enable ZCC integration with Microsoft software; Executive Conferencing, including up to 64 participants with a simple 'drag and drop' capability; Intelligent Mobility to provide seamless transference between UC applications on the mobile and the desktop; Lotus Notes unified messaging to integrate with the Lotus inbox (Outlook integration has been available for years); and Easy Dial for making calls by clicking on phone numbers in the user's browser or Microsoft documents.

Intelligent Mobility is one of the more impressive features, especially given the increase in mobile workers and the need for better tools to help them be more productive when away from the office. Intelligent Mobility provides mobile access to all ZCC functionality and desktop features (including presence, profiles and company directory). ZCC can detect whether you're at your desk, and if not it will then automatically route calls to your mobile device. Selected priority callers can be directed to the user's mobile device, while others are transferred to voice mailbox.

OCS integration is a must for any telephony vendor these days, so ZCC version 5 provides OCS interoperability but also enhances key OCS functionality with ZCC's own click-to-dial, rich presence, mobility, conferencing, and other telephony functions. Users can select either the Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC) client or the ZCC desktop client to view presence or availability status of colleagues, and to initiate functions such as click-to-call, chat, or IM. When working on a document, users can click on any contact phone number to initiate communication.

Zeacom¹s solutions aren¹t for everyone - their products are really aimed at mid-sized companies and as far as I know the company has no plans to expand to the larger enterprise. But for mid-sized companies that have been wanting to test the UC waters but didn¹t know how, here is one option to check out.