And RIM, which also has developed proprietary PBX software internally, expects to quickly ramp additional mobile unified collaboration capabilities with future, as yet unnamed, partnerships, according to RIM director of product management David Heit.

Heit said extending enterprise desktop voice capabilities to the BlackBerry was the last real bastion of the company’s broader unified communications strategy, following on from email, calendar, synchronization, browsing, applications and collaboration, which the company has achieved since it released its popular device in 1999.

Adding IBM’s Sametime collaborative suit and Domino email server to the BlackBerry pits RIM’s offerings against some being promised by the Microsoft Corp and Nortel Networks Corp joint venture, dubbed Innovative Communications Alliance.

Last week, Nortel and Microsoft pre-announced a few offerings for later this year, notably Unified Messaging, where Exchange 2007’s unified messaging capability will be integrated natively into a Nortel PBX via the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for IP telephony. This will enable click-to-call functionality from within the email environment, which is in the same vein of the IM offering that RIM and IBM touted yesterday.

The Sametime client software for the BlackBerry includes a new Convert to Call feature, which enables users in an IM group chat to convert their text discussions into a multi-party conference call. The call is initiated and managed through the enterprise PBX or a conference server, thanks to PBX software developed by RIM, Heit said.

RIM’s software enables the BlackBerry to handle disparate kinds of enterprise networks within the IM client, he said, noting the PBX environment is very heterogeneous.

As long as we know their phone number, it really doesn’t matter what type of technology [the caller’s enterprise telephony network] is based on, Heit said.

For the most part, enterprises have hybrid comms network, such as IP and PBX, making many of them unique. Instant messaging is in a state of migration … from fixed line to SIP-based PBXs and everything in between, Heit said. It’s been quite an evolution in terms of how you’re signaling with these environments.

Convert to Call works through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server to collect the presence information of each user from Lotus Sametime. It then invokes the enterprise PBX or conference server to initiate outbound calls to each user to pull them into a voice conference. At the end of the conference call, users are automatically returned back to their group IM session where they left off.

Ascendent’s PBX software Voice Mobility Suite, which RIM purchased for an undisclosed amount, also played a role in enabling this click-to calling capability, Heit said. Ascendent’s stuff helped extend conference calling capabilities to various mobile users from heterogeneous telephony environments.

And expect RIM to further exploit Ascendent’s technology, which also enables an incoming traditional PSTN call to be forwarded to the BlackBerry, as well as automatically route corporate voicemail to the device.

What we already have in terms of capability … This quickly extends to voice and will to other types of applications, Heit said. We’re seeing those types of applications and we’re just on the cusp of it.

The companies said yesterday’s announcement was the first as part of a series of planned initiatives to extend Sametime voice, presence and location-based services to the BlackBerry.

But for RIM to extend all the key core enterprise environments, including the PBX voice experience, it needs to form a number of partnerships with the major vendors in these spaces, Heit said.

Last year, the company announced a deal to add comms apps from Avaya, as well integration with Nortel’s Multimedia Communications Server (MCS) 5100. RIM’s only unified comms announcements with Cisco Systems Inc to date was in 2005, which was interoperability testing between Cisco Unified CallManager 5.0 via SIP and the BlackBerry.

Cisco, of course, is going it alone with its unified collab strategy. Heit stressed that RIM’s was taking a different approach. Our job is not to replace every PBX vendor out there, he said. We’re working with them, essentially.

RIM and IBM also yesterday announced a new Click to Map feature, which enables users to generate maps on a BlackBerry within a Sametime IM session.

Also, RIM has developed a Web Services Description Language to make mobile standard Domino Discussion databases, using its BlackBerry MDS Studio development tool.