Cisco PCAP & IBM Sametime - A MAJOR Update

At the end of last year, Cisco released an update to the Phone Control and Presence plug-in.  At the time, I posted just a quick copy of their announcement, but did not comment beyond that.  If you have a Cisco telephony environment with PCAP deployed, you should upgrade to this latest release for one MAJOR reason, it now supports live text in Notes.  If you don't have it deployed yet, do it now!

So why is this update such a big deal?  The number one question we would get from customers we were helping deploy this plug-in was "how can I click-to-call from a contact entry in Notes for someone who is not from our company, such as a customer or partner?"  Prior to this release, the answer was a disappointing, "You can't click-to-call directly from contact entry. Instead, you'll have to copy the phone number and paste it into the Sametime search bar." So even though Notes could recognize the phone numbers in many different locations, the Cisco PCAP plug-in did not tie its 'Phone Call' action to those numbers.

But now the Cisco PCAP plug-in is tied to live text in Notes, and Notes can recognize phone numbers just about anywhere, including:

In a Notes contact

In an email signature

In an email body

In a calendar entry

In a Domino application (no programming modification needed!)

In a Symphony document

There is no faster way to implement such sweeping ease of use improvements for end users.  I've blogged in the past about the holy grail in unified communications being CEBP or Communications Enabled Business Processes, and how Domino has to be the rapidest development platform for CEBP because of how easy it is to add Sametime awareness into a Domino application.  Well with Live Text and the new PCAP plug-in, you don't have to make ANY programming changes to your Domino applications to bring click-to-call capabilities into the context of every Domino business application you've developed in the Notes client. 

An essential part of being social is communicating with others, and this enables your users to communicate more easily in so many aspects of their day-to-day activities.  Don't wait, start rolling this out to your users as soon as possible.  It is inexpensive (the PCAP plug-in is free), and it does not require any infrastructure beyond your Notes, Sametime Standard and Cisco PBX systems.