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Anglo-American School of Moscow Deploys Cross-Platform Support of Unified Communications

The Anglo-American School of Moscow (AAS Moscow) has implemented a solution that can accommodate multiple unified communications (UC) platforms to support virtual video meetings and other communications between teachers, parents, and students.

The school initially deployed Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Enterprise Edition to promote collaboration between faculty, students, and parents, and currently has more than 2,000 users on the platform. The school also uses Microsoft Lync Enterprise Edition's A/V servers for voice and video calls and conferences and Microsoft Exchange for unified messaging. However, to support virtual video meetings between teachers and parents who are outside the AAS Moscow network, the school needed a way to communicate over disparate systems.

The school selected NextPlane Federation Cloud Service to bridge the gap. Faculty and students at AAS Moscow can now use their Microsoft Lync service to communicate with people on Google, IBM, Cisco, Isode, and OpenFire communications platforms, as though they were all on the same platform.

According to information released by the company, NextPlane Federation Cloud Service does not require on-premise components and supports presence, one-to-one, and multi-user chat, as well as Lync-to-Google voice and video capabilities. NextPlane supports TLS encryption over XMPP for security, so communications are encrypted from end-to-end, and administrators can use policies for additional control.

"We at AAS Moscow love adopting the latest technology to improve education," said Ilya Pekshev, Head of Systems and Network Operation for AAS of Moscow, in a prepared statement. "Our long­term objective is to use Google federation as a replacement for our parent-teacher conferences, and to create virtual connections for larger meetings. And our faculty and students have many friends overseas, so access to Google is a real convenience; it's great to offer the ability to stay in touch without incurring additional costs."

Further information about NextPlane Federation Cloud Service can be found at nextplane.net.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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