Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Secure messaging:
Applications integrating into Unified Presence can use IPSec
or TLS standards to encrypt and secure all communication.
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Cisco Unified Personal Communicator
You'll hardly find any documentation available about Cisco Unified Presence without see-
ing a mention of Cisco Unified Personal Communicator. Once you understand the pur-
pose of Personal Communicator, you'll understand why. This single-software application
brings together frequently used services in a single location: soft phone, presence, instant
messaging, visual voicemail, employee directory, communication history, video, and web
conferencing. When you initially see Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, it looks like
another IM client (shown in Figure 2-8); under the hood, it's so much more.
Figure 2-8
Cisco Unified Personal Communicator
At its core, Personal Communicator serves as an IM client, supporting peer-to-peer chat,
multiuser chat, and persistent chat. Persistent chat uses the idea of “rooms,” which allow
users to join existing chat sessions and see the conversation history (rather than simply the
new messages appearing after they have joined). Personal Communicator uses LDAP au-
thentication to log users into the IM client, for user searches, and to add contacts. Be-
cause Personal Computer uses the Cisco Unified Presence server, you are able to see not
only the status of a user as it relates to IM conversations, but you can also see the status
of their phone (off hook, on hook, and so on).
From Personal Communicator, you can start both voice and video calls with video resolu-
tions able to reach High Definition (HD) quality. Personal Communicator also acts as a full
softphone, allowing audio only calls from other audio devices (IP phones, softphones, and
so on) in the network. If you combine Personal Computer with one of the multipoint
video conference solutions offered by Cisco (such as Cisco Unified MeetingPlace or
Cisco Unified Video Conferencing), you are even able to run video-based conference calls
with multiple video sources!
