“Presence awareness is rapidly becoming a much sought after feature. The level of interest is likely to increase further as the PBX hardware vendors and desktop vendors develop solutions with much tighter integration between voice and instant messaging” comments Lesley Hansen, TeleWare Group Marketing Director. “As a solely telephony software and service provider, we have no vested interest in promoting any particular hardware platform or technology path, so the development of our intelligent Presence Manager is hardware agnostic in terms of connected PBXs and their networks and, of course, the handsets,” added Hansen.
Two features of the TeleWare iPM application make it unique. Firstly, iPM is a software only solution allowing a hardware independent deployment. The second is the ability to represent IP and traditional PBX hardware based extensions as virtual extensions through the TeleWare personal numbering solution. These virtual extensions provided by intelligent Number are enabled for presence information by iPM, bringing presence management to traditional DPNSS and Q-Sig based networks as well as the newer SIP IP Phones. This solution enhances the use of presence within the many mixed PBX networks and accommodates the many mixed vendor corporate telephony networks that exist in the market today and will continue to do so while companies protect their investment in existing hardware.
iPM provides a visual indication of the on-/off-call status and registered availability of each listed contact. As part of TeleWare’s commitment to open standards and increased customer choice, iPM with intelligent eXchange (the next generation TeleWare IP-PBX application) can be connected to and is compatible with PBX hardware and SIP compliant handsets from every major vendor.
TeleWare supports the strategy purported by companies such as IBM (Lotus Notes) and Microsoft to integrate telephony presence alongside instant messaging and the user desktop. Integration with both Microsoft’s LCS and IBM’s Sametime is included in the iPM roadmap for 2006 delivery, once beta trials have been completed.
Presence management for intelligent Number and intelligent Assistant users is immediately available, and is available for IP Centrex users on the TeleWare Hosted Service platforms.