Cisco EoS Announcements

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Aug 2011

In recent weeks, Cisco Systems have announced a slew of End of Sale (EoS) notices including the entire Unity voicemail line (as predicated by Intrinsic in an earlier post)

Unity is now officially EoS with Unity Connection being the recommended replacement product. Cisco Speech Connect, which provides Speech Recognition services to voicemail deployments is also EoS as a standalone product, as it has now been integrated into Unity Connection 8.5.

Also subject to EoS are the Cisco 7921 wireless handset (replaced with the more expensive 7925 version) and a couple of Gigabit models of the 2960 switch which are replaced with 2960S versions. Cisco 7911 handsets are also now EoS with the recommended replacement being the 6921.

Barry Hesk

Cisco Unity Connection 8.5(1) Announced

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Cisco Systems announced version 8.5(1) of Unity Connection on 25 March 2011.

A number of features have been added in version 8.5(1) including being able to full synchronize the Connection inbox through to Exchange. This is something that has been available in Unity Unified Messaging for a long time, so it’s great that it’s finally made it into Connection as well. I do however wonder where this leaves Unity as a strategic platform moving forwards however.

A major word of warning however, Unity Connection 8.5(1) has higher disk and memory requirements than previous versions of Unity Connection – specifically over and above versions 7.x and 8.0.

A minimum of 2 x 160 Gb drives is required per server and 4 GB of DRAM is also recommended in some configurations. This is higher than some older MCS hardware platforms which only shipped with dual 80 Gb drives and 2 GB of DRAM. Also some older MCS platforms (e.g. MCS-7852 I2) hardware cannot run version 8.5. Full details are available here.

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