Cisco showcased its Unified Communications System 7.0 at the company's recent UC Partner Summit. The release aims to improve ease-of-use, openness, interoperability, and total cost of ownership. It also includes upgrades to Cisco's Unified Mobile Communicator, MeetingPlace and WebEx integration, a Unified Customer Voice Portal, deeper integration with IBM and Microsoft desktop products, and extended third party development opportunities with a unified applications environment.

Commenting on the changes, Brian Riggs, research director for Enterprise Software and Communications at Current Analysis said: “The System 7 designation marks the collection of upgrades as having been tested and verified to work together seamlessly in specific customer environments. Cisco’s communications, collaboration, and conferencing products will continue to share a common software revision cycle and interoperability test schedule. This will help the company ensure that new software revisions remain in sync with other products in the larger collaboration portfolio.”

Upgrades to the Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator extend unified communications features including dial via office, presence integration (the client supported presence with other UMC clients before but it can now share presence info with Cisco’s desktop presence software), and corporate directory look-up to mobile workers. New time of day rules have been added for mobile workers to more easily adjust single number reach settings when they are traveling or do not wish to be disturbed. Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator supports devices running on Windows Mobile operating system, Symbian and BlackBerry operating systems.

The release also provides deeper integration with desktop products from IBM and Microsoft by enabling business-to-business exchange of presence and instant messaging between the Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, Microsoft Office Communicator users, and complete unified communications capabilities for Lotus Sametime.

The Cisco Unified Application Environment enhancements offer third-party developers three key components including an application designer with a visual integrated development environment for converged voice and data applications; a media engine to supply ready-to-use processing functions like advanced prompt processing, advanced conferencing, text-to-speech, and speech recognition; and an application server framework that abstracts complex telephony protocols.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.