Anglo American School of Moscow Extends Video Conferencing and Unified Communications with NextPlane's Federation Cloud Service

NextPlane, Inc.,  the market leader in cloud-based federation services for unified communications (UC), today announced that the Anglo American School of Moscow (AAS) is the latest educational institution to subscribe to the NextPlane Federation Cloud service. Using NextPlane, AAS Moscow now can federate its Microsoft Lync to Google other UC platforms to facilitate faculty meetings, parent/teacher conferences, and collaborative study.

AAS Moscow has more than 2,000 students and faculty that currently are using Microsoft Lync 2010 for internal collaborative communications, with plans to upgrade the school’s network to add more bandwidth in the near future and to integrate its Lync clients with its telecom system. Even though AAS has deployed Microsoft Lync for internal school communication AAS early on recognized that in order to be truly effective in communicating with parents, colleagues, and friends around the world it had to federate its Lync platform with Google and other UC systems. That’s why AAS selected NextPlane as its Federation Cloud service provider.

AAS selected the NextPlane Federation Cloud service because it provides hi-fidelity federation between Microsoft Lync and other key UC platforms, such as Google, as well as IBM Sametime, Cisco Jabber XCP, Unified Presence Server (CUPS) and WebEx Messenger (formerly Cisco WebEx Connect), Jive OpenFire, Isode M-Link and eJabberd. When connecting via the NextPlane Federation Cloud service, Lync and Google users can see each other’s presence (including custom and activity-based presence), engage in one-to-one chat, participate in multi-user chat sessions, and make voice and video calls. In fact, the NextPlane Federation Cloud is the only service with presence-aware voice and video communications between Microsoft Lync and Google.

“With transportation in Moscow being a challenge, our current plan is to use NextPlane to support Google video conferencing for parent-teacher meetings, and enable more virtual meetings for our faculty,” said Ilya Pekshev, Head of Systems and Network Operation for AAS of Moscow. “And our faculty and students have a lot of friends overseas, so access to Google with zero cost is a real convenience for the entire school. It’s this kind of technology that keeps AAS Moscow on the leading edge.”

Pekshev also notes that his mission is to not only create a real-time collaborative system, but also to provide a safe working environment for all his users. Part of the reason for choosing NextPlane was that the Federation Cloud service offers integrated security including central federation management and provisioning, support for TLS encryption over XMPP and the ability to control communications through policies.

The NextPlane Federation Cloud service accelerates building federated collaborative communities by eliminating the need to set up and maintain separate federation to multiple parties. NextPlane Federation Cloud service subscribers enjoy unprecedented control over which types of traffic (IM, presence, voice, video, and file transfer) are allowed or denied to any of their federated connections. Finally, using NextPlane’s unique analytics and reporting tools to provide valuable insight into how collaboration is affecting network operations.

About NextPlane, Inc.

NextPlane offers the NextPlane Federation Could service for unified communications (UC) platforms, seamlessly federating Microsoft LCS, OCS, OCS R2 and Lync, Cisco Jabber XCP, Unified Presence Server (CUPS) and WebEx Messenger (formerly Cisco WebEx Connect), IBM Sametime, Google Apps, Jive OpenFire, Isode M-Link and eJabberd. Using the NextPlane Federation Cloud service, organizations can connect users from different companies regardless of underlying UC platforms - with shared presence, instant messaging, multi-user chat, voice and video - as if they are on the same UC platform.

NextPlane offers an ideal solution for building collaborative communities around regardless of underlying UC platforms. NextPlane supports domain sharing, allowing two or more UC platforms to share the same domain name and federate internally and externally.