The new starter kits are designed to ensure any business can quickly capitalize on the benefits of unified communications – one-click access to phone calls, instant messaging, video conferencing, and other applications – through a rapid deployment to its most critical users. The kits are pre-tested to work seamlessly with other vendors' equipment allowing them to simply be plugged into an existing network – and minimizsng the risk of network downtime that adding so many new features to a network all at once can often cause.
These new kits comprise:
Mobile IP Starter Kit: Offers affordable mobile IP with Nortel WLAN handsets that work on most existing WLAN infrastructures. This kit can help enhance customer service by leveraging the power of presence – which allows front-line workers, such as nurses or a hotel's front-desk staff, to instantly access experts within their organization anywhere to resolve issues.
Road Warrior Starter Kit: Provides traveling employees with a soft-phone application that helps lower mobile phone costs by allowing them to conduct calls from a laptop through any Internet access point.
Work at Home Starter Kit: Helps businesses improve productivity and reduce real-estate costs by allowing employees to seamlessly work from home. Home-based workers also can assist in disaster recovery and business continuity from off-site locations unaffected by office-specific network issues.
UC Starter Kit: For those companies ready for deploy a complete unified communications solution, this kit delivers presence, application sharing, click-to-call, and integrated conferencing from the desktop that's easy to use and lowers the cost of conferencing by as much as 80 percent compared with outsourced conferencing solutions.
All the starter kits provide free trial licenses for up to 25 users based on the Nortel Communication Server 1000 and are engineered to support Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 or Office Communications Server 2007. Another benefit comes from the price tag: UC 1-2-3 bundles are priced up to 15 percent below the same components purchased piece-by-piece.
"Many customers have told us that they are looking for the opportunity to experience the benefits of unified communications before rolling it out company wide," said Net Payne, Nortel's vice-president, North America Enterprise marketing. "With UC 1-2-3 we've created a set of packages that allow customers to touch, feel and experience unified communications through limited deployments that give them a first-hand look into this exciting productivity enhancer. This is another example of Nortel's unwavering focus on making business simple for our customers and channel partners."