Paul Rowe, head of enterprise solutions marketing in the EMEA region for the Canadian networking vendor, said the clientless offering will be part of the next major release (v5.0) of its CS1000 IP PBX, scheduled for mid-2007. It will enable PBX extension to mobile phones, enabling their inclusion on the corporate dial plan, such that international calls can go over the PBX, for instance.
It will also make possible four-digit dialling to other employees on a corporate network, and of course, calls to someone’s desk phone number will be forwarded to the mobile. This offering will entail a mobile operator having an ISDN link to the PBX, such that when a user makes a call from their mobile, the calling line identification goes to the PBX but the full enterprise number is shown to the recipient, Rowe went on.
The client-based version will go further, enabling integration into Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) collaboration suite for features such as presence (including, if enabled by the corporate customer, federated presence) and instant messaging.
For WM5-based handsets, the client will be Microsoft’s Office Communicator, while for Symbian phones, we’ll possibly create our own clients to enable them to act as extensions on a CS1000, Rowe went on. Nortel will also bundle in the ability to interact with OCS, so that, in effect, the client will become a sort of Office Communicator for Symbian.
