Nothing Special About Unison UC Software Except the Price, eWEEK Labs Finds

by Andrew Garcia

Unison’s Control Panel, the Web-based configuration page, presents administrators immediately with some status and utilization metrics.

Administrators can easily assign extensions and control extension length from the Control Panel.

Admins assign phones to users, getting the device ID and password for SIP registration in the process. Unison should work with any SIP phone, but adds greater ease of configuration for some Cisco System phones.

The Unison Desktop presents users with corporate and personal contact lists, from which users can easily trigger calls, e-mails or instant messages.

With two clicks, users can update the presence status shown to others.

Users can set up a custom phone to ring through to a cell phone or other external extension.

Administrators can set up global and departmental address books on the Unison Server, while users can maintain individual personal contact lists as well.

Presence information is only displayed in the Desktop’s inline IM client—Unison Messenger. Unfortunately, admins can’t create departmental or global rosters, so users have to add people—both internal and external—themselves.

Unison reluctantly supports mobile devices via IMAP, but the company did add some barriers to mobile adoption. The Desktop client password is not the same as the IMAP password; to obtain the latter, administrators have to log into the Unison Server MySQL database and run a script to extract each user’s IMAP password.