Toshiba America Information Systems’ telecommunications division has introduced its next generation of unified communications solutions, compatible with its previous products and available through its network of Toshiba authorized dealers.

The Toshiba Strata Call Manager—aimed at markets from enterprise to small business—is billed as a UC solution that adds many features and is compatible with Toshiba’s Strata CIX family of business communication systems.

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You would expect call center customers to embrace this type of product, but Ben Berg, a partner at Transcom Telecommunications, an authorized Toshiba dealer in Lakewood, Calif., told Channel Insider that enterprise and even small business customers can see the value in unified communications once they see a demonstration. Berg says his smallest customer has three employees using the system and the largest has 138 users.

The Strata Call Manager provides integration with any number of third-party CRM-type applications, according to Berg, who adds that the solution is part of a natural evolution of Toshiba telecom products.

“The call manager is the evolution spin-off of NetPhone from Toshiba, which we’d been using for years,” he said. The new product includes features such as built-in chat, call history, a built-in Web browser, and a hot-key feature that enables the user to highlight any phone number in a Windows app (“It doesn’t have to be a contact in the database”) and have the system dial that number, plus many other features.

The Toshiba Strata Call Manager’s Ribbon graphical user interface is based on Microsoft’s Fluent UI and groups together common features to make it easy for users to find what they are looking for. Dealers and end-user companies can also program buttons in the UI and add buttons for ACD (automatic call distributor) functionality.

The Strata Call Manager also features the following:

• Presence Viewer to display the status of other users
  
• Instant messaging/chat features
• Desktop call control from the PC rather than desk telephones
• Customized call handling