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Current VOIP Capabilities Of CPS

Friday, 11 January 2008 by Michel Roth

Derek Thorslund has published an insightful article about the current capabilities of Citrix Presentation Server in regards to delivering phone functionality. I bet there's a vendor out there who's try to patent the "virtualized phones" concept.

In his article Derek explains the capabilities that Presentation Server (with or without some additional product) has in enabling the delivery of phone functions, affectionately called "softphones". Your current options are:

To publish softphones. VOIP vendor like Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and the likes of these almost all offer a software phone to use their VOIP infrastructure. I've had some "challenges" in Citrix environments with these products because some of these do not seem to have been developed with Terminal Services in mind....

Stream softphones to desktops. This possibility has been added in PS 4.5. The advantage here is that peripheral support should be easier.

At iForum in Las Vegas last year, Citrix, HP and Cisco jointly demonstrated softphone streaming to a Windows XPe thin client. Enabling telephony is one of the common functions of an embedded operating system. We're still accepting requests from customers who would like to field test this solution. Amazingly, it was all done with generally available product releases.

EasyCall. If you have a platinum card, you get everything. Easycall was introduced in Feature Pack 1 for Presentation Server 4.5 and allows you to deliver "click-to-call" (I love that word) functionality. Do not forget to buy a Citrix Communications Gateway though.

Read Derek's article here .