SSP seeks 'unified' way forward
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The Scottish Socialist Party is holding a rally where it is expected to issue a public appeal for loyalty.
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As the number of Web services specifications proliferates, some developers advocate a return to a simpler approach.
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North and South Korea, aiming to fulfil their long-held dream of fielding a joint Olympic team, met on Tuesday to try to iron out differences on the composition of a unified squad, officials said.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco's highly publicized cooperation with Microsoft on unified communications will focus on sharing presence information as well as on voice mail, Web conferencing, and other areas, a Cisco executive said Tuesday. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged last month to make their companies' technologies work together even as they compete in areas like voice call control. Details of the effort have been scarce, and some critics have called the Webcast promise a mere show of peace between two companies struggling over the lucrative communications and collaboration business. Unified communications is a buzzword for combining all forms of IP communications, making them accessible on a single client or from within applications. Because voice calls, text messaging, videoconferences, and online collaboration can all be controlled by software now, Microsoft is pitted against Cisco and longtime telecommunications vendors in the battle for this market. Rick McConnell, Cisco's executive sponsor of the partnership in the unified communications area, outlined one key objective of the effort in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday. Currently, Cisco federates all the presence and availability information from its unified communications systems and publishes that data to Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS), which can then push it to Microsoft clients. Microsoft doesn't reciprocate. The companies are working on making the same kinds of information go from Microsoft's software into Cisco's, said McConnell, who is vice president and general manager of Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit. The way it is now, if an enterprise uses Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call control software and an employee picks up the phone, a colleague's Microsoft Office Communicator messaging client will show that employee as being on the phone. But if an employee indicated in Office Communicator that she was away from her desk, that information wouldn't show up on a colleague's Cisco IP phone. Making federated presence work both ways will make that possible, McConnell said. Cries for cooperation are rampant among Cisco's customers, according to McConnell. "I'm on the phone with at least one customer per day ... that's asking us about our Microsoft integration roadmap," McConnell said. Cisco's network domination and Microsoft's software role make that inevitable. "We're going to interoperate, frankly, in almost every account that we participate in," he said. "We have a deep interoperability roadmap, we'll deliver against that roadmap, and then the customer gets to pick," McConnell said. Most customers so far have chosen Microsoft for client software and Cisco for call control processing and multimedia conferencing, and he expects that to continue. Senior Cisco and Microsoft leaders in unified communications meet at least quarterly and typically more often, he said. But McConnell didn't mince words when discussing Microsoft as a competitor. The software giant has taken limited steps to share users' presence and availability information because doing so would let users adopt any kind of unified communications client, and Microsoft wants to own all the clients, he said. And Microsoft's forays into call management are weak compared with Cisco's more seasoned offerings, he said. "I think it's going to be some time before Microsoft really gets call control right," McConnell said.
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Cape Clear release this industry solution &quot;in response to the rapid adoption of Web services, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) integration platform throughout the telecommunications industry.&quot;
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Microsoft and Sun Microsystems say they are warming up to each other, but it will take more time to deliver on the grand promises of platform interoperability announced last spring.
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As servers and storage start to merge into unified, virtualized systems, Cisco wants to do the same thing with the networks that connect them.
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A proposed standard to enable integration, automation and better management of data center components this week will begin development under the direction of a new standards
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Physicists have dreamt about it for decades: harnessing the fusion process that powers the sun to make clean, safe and limitless energy. A multinational pact signed Tuesday may bring that dream a step closer to reality.
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Palestinian militant groups again call for the setting up of a unified leadership following Yasser Arafat's death.
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Chancellor Gordon Brown has said Labour had to build a &quot;shared national purpose&quot; and a &quot;progressive consensus&quot; in the run-up to the next election.
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In a quick post to his blog, Lukas Smith notes his support of the recent announcement of the PEAR elections.   I am confident that both of the proposals will help in improving collaboration in PEAR, mainly because they basically provide the same organization we used to have for all of PEAR (which worked great in the beginning), now for categories of related packages.   He reasons that, since PEAR is such a huge project, it needs this kind of approach - a method to the madness - to help keep the project on the right path.
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It's what executives of SBC Communications Inc. call their vision for the future: combining voicemail, e-mail and incoming fax messages in one system that can be accessed on the Web or on the phone.
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Â· Brown says burden must be shared out better  Â· US secretary of state's concern at threat in south
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A long-anticipated merger may soon come true.
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THE HAGUE, Jul 5 (IPS) - A "new partnership" between rich and poor  countries is required if the United Nations goals of reducing  extreme poverty by 2015 are to be realised, according to an  official who helped devise those objectives.
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The industryâs latest allies -- Microsoft and Sun -- have supported the publication of Web Services Management (WS-Management), a Web services specification that provides a common way for enterprises to access and exchange management information across