New Releases from ShoreTel
New Releases from ShoreTel by Robbie Pleasant
ShoreTel made a number of announcements at Interop Las Vegas, including new collaboration solutions, an enhanced online portal for cloud customers, and a new unified communications and infrastructure bundled offering.
Among the new releases is ShoreTel 12.3, a collaboration solution designed to meet the ever-growing demand from large enterprise customers. It supports up to 10,000 concurrent instant messaging clients, 1,000 audio conferencing ports, and 500 web conferencing ports. With its Linux-based Service Appliance 400, collaboration services are tightly integrated and administered by IT in ShoreTel Director and managed by the end user in ShoreTel Communicator.
ShoreTel has also released the M5 Portal, an enhanced customer administrative tool and business intelligence interface for its cloud-based phone system. It's a simplified interface that provides users with a single application for managing user preferences, system configuration, and business intelligence data. Users can set preferences like call routing, review call statistics, and manage voicemail through a web interface, and can provide managers with information such as sales performance, service levels, and staffing efficiency. M5 Portal will be free to all existing M5 customers.
Finally, ShoreTel has announced that it is cooperating with Polycom and HP solutions to provide a set of unified communications solutions on a secure, resilient, and flexible network infrastructure. The combined offering lets organizations simplify design and management with a flexible approach, deliver a consistent user experience across a wide range of platforms and devices, and increase reliability and resiliency with availability through a flexible network and distributed UC architecture.
"ShoreTel has been busy at Interop with a series of announcements, and is starting to put some stakes in the ground following their M5 acquisition," says Jon Arnold, UC Expert for UCStrategies. "By partnering with HP and Polycom, they now have a full UC offering to compete directly against Cisco and Avaya. Add to that news about version 12.3 and SA-400, and they now can claim large-scale collaboration to serve enterprises. Going the other way, the M5 portal enhances their cloud offering with better analytics and reporting. That's a lot to digest from one vendor; if they execute well, they'll be fine - but if not, they'll create confusion with both channels and end customers."
For more information, visit www.shoretel.com.