NextPlane Supports Google Hangouts Enabling Collaboration with Business Partners
January 24, 2014
By Shamila Janakiraman, TMCnet Contributor
NextPlane, a provider of B2B UC collaboration and federation services, now offers support for Google (News - Alert) Hangouts. Users of Microsoft, Cisco and other unified communications platforms will be able to collaborate with partners using Google Hangouts.
Organizations that are desirous to provide B2B collaboration to customers and partners that use Google Hangouts can now leverage the NextPlane UC Exchange, said officials.
B2B UC collaboration is known as UC federation and is capable of enabling end-users to keep their business associates engaged with other partner organizations in real-time. This is made possible via instant messaging and presence (IM&P), multi-party chat, voice, video calling and conferencing. This is similar to using the same UC platform.
As an optimized unified messaging system, Google Hangouts synergizes the capabilities of Google’s disparate communications services. It replaces Google Talk, Google + Messenger, and the original Google + Hangouts video chat service. Also the product can be accessed using smartphones, tablets and the Web via Google Chrome.
However when launching the new system Google dropped support for the XMPP protocol for federated communications. This made it impossible for customers and partners to collaborate with users of Google Hangouts.
Farzin Shahidi, president of NextPlane, explained that Google elected to drop support for XMPP in order to force users to move to their new version of Hangouts. This deprived customers and partners on XMPP-based UC platforms of the ability to leverage the potential of B2B collaboration.
“Our new feature for Google Hangouts re-establishes the opportunity for this collaboration,” pointed out Shahidi.
NextPlane leverages a unique proxy-based federation technology to provide a seamless collaboration between users on Google Hangouts domains and major UC platforms like Microsoft Lync, social networks, and public IM networks such as Skype (News - Alert).
Recently NextPlane announced that its UC Exchange Service provides support for the Microsoft (News - Alert) Office 365 service. Companies wanting to collaborate with their business partners that have deployed Office 365, as well as Office 365 customers, who want to collaborate with partners on other UC platforms, can now do so seamlessly through the NextPlane UC Exchange.
Edited by Cassandra Tucker