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Review: Nortel Networks' Multimedia Communication Server 5100 3.0: Page 3 of 6

As enterprises increasingly decentralize their workforces, there's a growing requirement for effective collaboration tools that can help those distributed users work more effectively together. Networking vendors recognize this and have responded during the past 12 months with numerous acquisitions aimed at delivering such a product.

One common vision vendors are espousing--and we'll continue to hear about it in the months ahead--is triple play. By combining three different communications media, users can initiate IM sessions with other users, switch to voice when necessary, and layer on video if available. During those sessions, users can share files, co-edit documents, and share a whiteboard. By integrating presence capabilities, the status of other individuals can be checked so that they can be brought into the conference. Find me/follow me capabilities can in turn be used to locate key individuals when necessary and is a natural accompaniment to presence capabilities.

The MCS gives Nortel customers all this functionality. The latest version can also communicate with Nortel's Communication Server 1000 4.0 using SIP server-to-server calling, also called SIP trunking. With the MCS, network architects can deliver presence capabilities to all users, even if they lack a SIP phone.

While the MCS can't quite smoothly migrate a call between the three media types, it comes close. Users can start with an audio call, switch to video, and then if desktop sharing or collaboration is required, push a Web link to users on the call. Users can click on the link to publish the page to everyone's desktop.

The MCS ships with standard audio conferencing services, such as call recording, audio emoticons, and muting. Conferencing reservations are also integrated with Microsoft Office, allowing users to click-call from a directory. While IM has been available in previous versions of MCS, in this release Nortel has added one-to-many IM chatting and the ability to have a chat conference. With one-to-many IM chatting, a single user can send a message to multiple recipients and receive multiple responses. With chat conferences, those recipients can respond in a common forum.