Enterprise Communicationsmitel

Mobility with Video

by Dave Michels

A few thoughts on ShoreTel Mobility 8

  • ShoreTel released Mobility 8 last month (Aug 8).
  • ShoreTel Mobility 8 includes the router and ShoreTel Mobility Clients for iOS and Android. The clients support single-touch dialing which now includes video calls too.
  • The update gives ShoreTel a much more complete mobile portfolio
  • The update brings virtualization to the Shortel Mobility Router. ShoreTel was way behind on virtualization, and it’s clearly been a priority for the past year – since Joos became the CEO.
  • Mobility 8 integrates with ShoreTel Communicator. This enables the same interface for mobile and desktop users. Also extends the “Join” feature to third party services such as WebEx.
  • The Join feature is the sizzle – one touch connect to a conference without pin codes or other nonsense. This is a nice to have on a desktop, but critical on a mobile. The Join button is not in the calendar, but in the ShoreTel Mobility client.
  • Mobility 8 also integrates with room-based video rooms using H.264AVC. Video is supported over Wi-Fi and cellular.
  • ShoreTel Mobility 8 intersects UC, Mobility, Video, and BYOD.
  • If you buy into the death of hard phones – and if you think PCs have peaked – then the mobile device is positioned to inherit the UC world. In the meantime, you may consider the ShoreTel Dock.
  • ShoreTel Mobility is currently available for premises-based implementations. However, a ShoreTel Sky version is coming. I think that means that ShoreTel Sky customers will soon get access to the Mobility Client. It could also mean that premises-based customers may be able to subscribe to ShoreTel Mobility as a service n the future.
  • This is part of an ongoing strategy at ShoreTel: To align the cloud and premises businesses with complementary services. Cloud and Premises don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The refined strategy emerging is deployment neutrality with a consistent catalog of services for either.
  • An example of this strategy is ShoreTel Connect Scribe which adds voice mail transcription services hosted in the cloud to on-premises systems.