Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 6:44PM The Lync team has released these great additional features. The Lync Power Pack applications are being made available as part of the broader Lync Adoption and Training Kit. With this release of the Power Pack, five new applications join the previously released IM an Expert app.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 9:09PM Here's the MS Office 365 Pricing and Plan sheet
Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 12:49PM REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 19, 2010 — With the announcement of Microsoft Office 365, the productivity power of the cloud just got a turbo boost for customers of all sizes. The new service brings familiar applications, including Office desktop software and Office Web Apps, together with SharePoint, Exchange and Lync in the cloud, for the first time.
Monday, October 11, 2010 at 8:29AM Cisco just did a great Mobile Devices Q/A in a partner session organized by Kip Schroeder. Great roadmap information for mobile workers using Cisco products.
Cisco Systems, Mobile in Cisco, Industry News Friday, September 17, 2010 at 10:47AM Most understand what SIP (Session Initiation Procotol) is and what part it plays in telephony. We often describe it as the "newer way of terminating" that is cost effective and about every Ineternet Service Provider provides a flavor of it. If you arent familiar with the basics please look at some background here on SIP.
In Unified Communications there is a fairly newer protocol that has been gaining some attention called XMPP. In short, XMPP is a protocol (like SIP). XMPP was majorly used for presence and Instant Messaging. But it is being expanded to other areas like call signal controlling. Here are some basic facts about XMPP
Within the leading products we deploy on a regular basis (Cisco and Microsoft) there are multiple products that support XMPP, like Webex Connect, Microsoft's Office Communication Server as well as Cisco CUPS. Microsoft product has to have an additional configuration setup and server in order to support XMPP and it not a native server role with the edge service. As for Cisco CUPS, with the release of CUPS 8.0 that introduces the jabber platform, it is based on XMPP.
A little history about XMPP, it was introduced in 1998 and later refined by the Jabber open source community that Cisco aquired a couple of years back.
Since XMPP is a protocol, it has many streams of communications or eXtensions that are used for different "features" you see within your chat window you use on a daily basis. Technical developers have different names for the standards they come to develop, then what we end user come to know them as.
For example a couple eXtensions within the protocol are "chat state notifications" which is indicating whether a chat partner is actively engaged in the chat, composing a message, temporarily paused, inactive, or gone. We also call that a presence status.
Another example is a "jingle" which is managing peer-to-peer media sessions in a way that is interoperable with existing standards. We end users know this as a voice chat, video chat or file transfer.
If you are interested in learning more about the XMPP protocol and the extension standards, they can be found here.
I hope this provided you with some interesting tidbits about XMPP and all protocols for that matter. Every feature within an application we use (Browser, Outlook,etc.) has some sort of communication protocol that is driving the ability for you to do basic tasks.
When we all come to adopt the standard that it becomes a GREAT technology that we highly depend on. Most of the time using it as a business tool just like E-Mail. From a philisophical level, this protocol "adoption" approach is Metcalfe's law.
-D