ShoreTel’s Enhanced Unified Communications Solution Facilitates Greater Business Productivity and Collaboration

ShoreTel’s latest release of its Unified Communications (UC) system streamlines business communications, offering customers more intuitive access to fully integrated voice, instant messaging, e-mail and video. ShoreTel® takes advantage of the most recent enhancement to the H.264 standard for video compression: Scalable Video Coding (SVC), enabling ShoreTel to provide high-quality video and network resiliency at an attractive cost to every desktop, including remote users. ShoreTel also announced two energy-efficient voice switches that drive down an enterprise’s overall communication costs.

“The latest version of the ShoreTel Pure IP Unified Communications Solution offers the most significant set of feature enhancements in terms of helping us help our customers embrace a true enterprise-wide UC strategy,” says Jeff Ridley, director of product management at ShoreTel. “ShoreTel’s ShoreWare® Professional Call Manager is at the heart of this release, and it adds enormously to the overall multimedia capabilities of ShoreTel.”

Enhanced Productivity and Collaboration
ShoreWare Call Manager’s third-generation desktop user interface has a whole new look that improves both the visual appeal and usability. It offers tabbed windows that make users more productive by making it easier and faster to access voicemail, call history, directories and the speed dial list. The system also offers more intuitive call control features, anticipating user needs and presenting productivity-enhancing information and tools based on the situation. For example, when a user starts to transfer a call, the phone status of the called party is shown in real time, letting the caller to decide whether or not to proceed with the transfer.

ShoreTel’s ShoreWare Professional Call Manager supports easy-to-use, high-quality video (up to 640x480 resolution and up to 30 frames per second), making a video call as natural and as simple as a voice call. Thanks to H.264/SVC, the highly resilient video is delivered with minimal delay, eliminating distance as an impediment to face-to-face conversations and making it easier for users across the enterprise to communicate and collaborate effectively. Easy-to-use, high-quality video calls support company initiatives to reduce travel expenses, reduce the impact on the environment and support remote workers.

Professional Call Manager also provides presence information and consolidates instant messaging with voice, video and e-mail for a true UC experience. With rich presence information, users immediately know who is available and respond quickly to a caller’s need. A built-in soft phone capability keeps users productive even when a telephone isn’t available.

Greater Deployment Flexibility: New Voice Switches, Support for SIP
ShoreTel’s new ShoreGear® 30 voice switch is targeted at branch locations with up to 10 users and can be reconfigured to support up to 30 IP phones, or to support SIP trunks or devices. The ShoreGear 30 includes ShoreTel’s distributed call processing software, insuring that telephony services for the remote location will be fully reliable during WAN outages. During these outages, local analog trunks would be used for PSTN dialing.

The ShoreGear 24A voice switch supports the need for higher density analog phone deployments. It provides 24 analog ports and can be configured to support multi-party conference calls. It also includes ShoreTel’s distributed call processing software, insuring telephony services for the remote location will be fully reliable during WAN outages.

ShoreGear voice switches are more environmentally friendly than competitive solutions. They use significantly less power, require less cooling, have a longer useful life, and take up less space, resulting in substantially lower carbon emissions.

ShoreTel’s UC system also now includes built-in support for SIP endpoints, devices, and applications that comply with RFC 3261. SIP is a flexible signaling protocol that works alongside SIP-compliant network devices as well as VoIP and other established standards. Complementing the system’s support for SIP trunking, SIP device interfaces give customers more flexibility to deploy the devices required for their specific business needs. Support for SIP devices does not require an expensive additional server, thus lowering total cost of ownership. ShoreTel has also expanded its SIP certification program, enabling more manufacturers of SIP-compliant devices to integrate with ShoreTel products

System Security
The latest release of ShoreTel enhances overall system security by increasing the strength of the integrated media encryption. The encryption process is hardened through the use of 128-bit encryption, making it far more difficult to eavesdrop on calls.

Enhanced Manageability
ShoreTel’s latest release also has enhanced manageability and reporting. Voicemail rePORT 64,85,224,78,134,197 e Director to provide the administrator tools to monitor voicemail disk space utilization for optimal storage management. The system voicemail report lists usage statistics for all servers in the ShoreTel system, including the Headquarter Server and Distributed Voice Servers.

ShoreTel’s latest release is currently available in the U.S. only. Please call ShoreTel or a local reseller for specific availability.