Unison: Free Unified Communications Software

While Unison technically provides presence capabilities that allow Unison users to see when other users are available, busy or on the phone, I found this feature to be a bolted-on afterthought. Instead of incorporating presence views into the corporate or personal directories, presence may only be viewed in the Unison Messenger IM client pane and each Unison user must individually add contacts to their own Unison Messenger roster.

To add a contact to a Unison Messenger, users must request permission from the contact to take such action. Extrapolated out, this means that as it currently stands, to set up presence among everyone within a company requires every user to manually add every user to their own roster and request permission from that contact—which is simply a ridiculous requirement.

I would prefer to see presence information included automatically with the corporate directory, or, failing that, administrators should be allowed to pre-configure and deploy pre-assigned Unison Messenger rosters. Unfortunately, Unison does not currently support shared rosters, although Unison representatives claim shared Messenger rosters will be available sometime this year. ´

Conclusion

Unison Server and Desktop unified communications software offers a good, basic UC experience, but lacks too many features to be useful to enterprises with advanced UC needs. The Unison software doesn’t have extensibility to mobile device or applications, doesn’t offer collaboration between users and has limited conferencing abilities. But with integrated VOIP, IM, presence, e-mail and calendaring, it delivers an experience similar to Microsoft Office and Communicator merged together.