OnSIP adds Instant Messaging to Hosted VoIP

I am a huge fan of My.OnSIP.com. Ok, yes, I'm supposed to be, but still, I love it. I love drag and drop call transfer. I love that I don't have to remember extensions - I just click on a name to call someone. I can see who is on a phone call before I call or IM them. My.OnSIP.com has given me hours of productivity and saved me untold levels of phone-tag frustration.

One of the harder things for me to give up, however, was my other Instant Messaging clients. On my Mac I prefer Adium and for Windows my choice is PSI. On the iPhone I prefer IM+ Lite and the recently announced Meebo. I have contacts in there from my AIM days, from Gmail and others. When an IM came in, I had to check two different applications to see who was chatting with me.

With the announcement today that OnSIP now supports IM on any XMPP-based application, OnSIP is now VoIP and IM on any standards based app or phone. That means I have the best of both worlds with a unified IM roster of my colleagues here at work (who are using OnSIP) along with my other IM contacts outside of my company (who are not on our OnSIP account). With the new support for XMPP-based apps from OnSIP, I configured my Adium IM client so I can IM everyone in my OnSIP account as well as on other XMPP based IM services. What's great is I have the choice of the most popular XMPP IM clients. I use Adium, but you could use Trillian, PSI or others.

For a true Unified Communications experience, you can use Counterpath's Bria soft phone which allows voice, video, IM and presence all in one application for OnSIP Hosted PBX users. (Config Page in KB.)

Once again, our standards-based/no walled garden approach has paid off for our customers. We have always been committed to customer choice and we believe you should not be told what IM client or VoIP phone you must use. That's why we followed up our my.onsip release with support for ANY XMPP platform. Now, we are working to enable phone status, e.g. "on a call", in other XMPP browsers as well. That is a tougher engineering challenge since there is little standardization for those messages, but we're working on it to enhance the customer experience. We will continue to innovate and change the world of business communications from one of proprietary technologies and walled gardens to one of open standards and open access.