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Global Crossing Pushes Unified Communications Envelope: Page 2 of 2

Another Global Crossing app that takes advantage of OCS is a kiosk at the entrance of several of the company's largest sites. When visitors arrive, they enter their names and the names of the employees they're coming to see. OCS sends an instant message to the potential hosts notifying them that they have visitors, and it can transmit video to the hosts as well. The app will send the notification to hosts regardless of whether they're at their desks, logged in on another computer elsewhere, or using a mobile device. The hosts can then open up either an instant message session or audio path to the kiosk to chat with the visitors, or can choose to accept or reject the visitors.

Once accepted, pictures of the visitors are grabbed and temporary passes are printed at the kiosk. "It really saves time and money from having to have a receptionist or a security guard," Fuqua said.

Global Crossing also is testing the use of what it calls M-Bots, or mobile bots. When salespeople or other mobile workers want a piece of pertinent information like recent sales data on a customer, they can send a quick message to a chat bot that responds with a list of options on what kind of information to return. The bot is actually interfacing with back-end sales systems or other systems and communicating data via instant message.

What's next is even further out. Global Crossing is looking into using CAD applications on Microsoft Surface multitouch computers to design its networks, and bringing OCS into the picture to share designs via OCS's whiteboard feature and to discuss the designs with fellow employees and customers.

"Unified communications is going to open up scenarios that you and I can't imagine today," Gurdeep Singh Pall, Microsoft's unified communications VP, said in a recent interview. Global Crossing isn't just imagining those scenarios, it's actively implementing them.

To further understand the unified communications market, InformationWeek has interviewed more than 300 companies to get their take on UC and VoIP. Download the independent report here (registration required).