Verizon Business rolls out Spontaneous Collaboration

Verizon Business announced Wednesday that it has added a "Spontaneous Collaboration" feature that will allow for instant meetings within several leading unified communications platforms, including Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, IBM Lotus SameTime and CiscoJabberXCP. The plug-in will allow meeting leaders to send hyperlinks to other participants through IM, e-mail, and calendars, which, once clicked, will initiate a call to the phone of their choice.

The meeting leader has full functionality within the "spontaneous" meeting displayed in a pop-up moderator tool. The leader can see the status of other participants as well as mute and unmute individual participants during the call.

"This plug-in will come in handy for faster collaboration, if for instance, we were on IM together and an idea was not coming across and we needed to switch to voice,"said Bill Versen, director of global unified communications and collaboration for Verizon. "I send the hyperlink invite to you and whoever else we need to bring in on the call, you select the link and whether you're on mobile or at your desk, and we're on the phone together in about 15 seconds."

Versen said users only need their Verizon ID to authenticate once they've installed the plug-in, and all preferences are loaded, including bridge numbers and alternate numbers.

"Workforces are becoming increasingly distributed across various sites and these new capabilities meet a growing demand for tools to fuel real-time decision-making," said Jim Tyrrell, vice president of Global Business Voice Solutions for Verizon. "These capabilities help organizations to make the most of their existing work tools like instant messaging and calendar applications." 

For more:
- see the press release here

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