UC Exchange Offers Free Google Federation

UC Exchange creator NextPlane Inc. is now offering free Google federation to organizations using Microsoft OCS, Microsoft Lync, or IBM Sametime.

Launched in October, UC Exchange is a cloud-based federation service for unified communications. Member organizations can connect users from different companies regardless of their underlying UC platform  with presence, instant messaging, multiuser chat, voice and video  all as if they are on the same UC platform without requiring on-premises hardware or software. UC Exchange also enables its member organizations to federate their UC platforms with social business communities such as Yammer, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn and XMPP hosted chat rooms.

Google federation is being offered as part of free membership in UC Exchange. Companies that upgrade to a paid subscription can access additional features including voice and video federation with Google as well as federation with other UC platforms, social media, and Skype.

“Our free Google federation for organizations with a Microsoft or IBM unified communications platform gives users a significantly better real time collaboration experience,” said Farzin Shahidi, founder and CEO of NextPlane. “By using NextPlane UC Exchange, IT departments can go beyond the serious limitations of Inter-vendor UC interoperability solutions which are not being addressed by UC vendors.”

In addition to the free Google federation service, organizations can access to the UC Exchange Management Portal to search the UC Exchange Members Directory of more than 100 “federation ready” organizations, accept inbound federation requests at a no additional charge, and get access to usage reports.