Phone Commander - free portable softphone

Phone Commander is a free portable softphone that you can use to make and receive VoIP phone calls from your PC, iPhone or Android based smartphone.

Phone Commander like a telephone to let you make calls through your computer. Call anyone via the internet who also has a softphone installed and if you sign up with a VoIP gateway service company you call regular telephone numbers as well.

The advantage of using Phone Commander is that you can leverage low cost or free VoIP calls and you can connect to the company SIP PBX and work remotely.

Easy to use and powerful Windows program was designed for people who want to improve dynamic interactions with contacts and to manage contact information. It supports multiple SIP accounts and save calls history.

See all contact information for incoming calls. For example, you can see Firstname, Lastname, Birhdate, Company name and other information before call answering. Keep detailed records and notes in your call log about each call and contact.

You can use Phone Commander as a customer database, or personal contact address/phone book, working with groups for managing contact info of individuals and organizations with relationships. Phone numbers, emails, web pages, faxes, pagers, addresses, customer notes - you can save all this data in an organized format.

You can dial phone numbers in one click via Internet. Program has a simple intuitive interface and quick and easy contact lookup. Import and export features are also available.

Attractive and easy-to-use organizer & PIM will keep track of your contacts, addresses, distribution lists, manage your schedule, remind about appointments, and keep your daily notes in order, store your contacts and call by one click. The slick user interface makes it a snap to find addresses and phone numbers, enter reminders.

With its intuitive & familiar interface, users can seamlessly transition from a traditional hard phone environment into the world of Voice over IP. Also by making the navigation simple and user friendly, Phone Commander provides users with easy access to address book management.

The program detects DTMF user input, sends DTMF (Inbound, SIP INFO, RFC2833), supports G.721 A-law/Mu-law, GSM.610, Speex. You can select audio In/Out Devices.

SIP Showcase Instant Messaging and Presence
SIP Showcase Instant Messaging and Presence IMPP
> SHOWCASE > INSTANT MESSAGING AND PRESENCEInstant Messaging and Presence

Instant Messaging and Presence

Instant Messaging has built up a substantial user base and is finding its place among other forms of communication such as telephony and email. It is near real-time and can offer degrees of efficiency and effectiveness that voice and mail cannot.

Instant Messaging and buddy lists have become closely associated; the concept of the "buddy list" arose out of IM when used in combination with presence. This was popularised by AOL and supported by the ICQ software. A buddy list is a list of known users whose presence, or otherwise, is indicated. If a user is online and available to receive a message an indicator will display this information to other users who have subscribed to that user's presence information. By double-clicking on the name of the user an instant message can be sent in near real-time.

The nature of this communication is less obtrusive than a phone call and consequently IM has found its niche among other more common forms of communication. It is very well suited to immediate, informal but important exchanges of ideas and information among users in a distributed group. Integrating easily with the desktop environment (the clients are usually lightweight), IM can be used as part of the portfolio of personal or business communications.

IM for the enterprise

Both AOL and Yahoo Messenger have established a considerable user community in the business world and enterprise IT managers are beginning to take note. Lotus and Microsoft are deploying IM servers in conjunction with their enterprise platforms and Yahoo is building an IM component into its corporate MyYahoo offering. IM is being integrated with a number of CRM applications and will be used more extensively for out-bound corporate communications.

With SIP, a session can consist of any form of communication so it is possible to promote an IM session to a telephone call or even a whiteboard or video session at the click of a button. Indeed, a number of IM providers are moving towards a VoIP-based "instant telephony" service.

It is also easy to invite other people to join your session, creating spontaneous conference calls. Using third party call control, a conference service could even check the presence status of people due to join a conference and when all the parties are available it could establish the session by connecting them all to a conference bridge.

IM and mobile

The boom of SMS messages shows that there is clearly a precedent for IM in the mobile world. Following 3GPP's decision to utilise SIP as its signalling protocol, SIP is set to be the platform upon which an IM service is based for future mobile deployments. The location and presence facilities inherent in SIP ensure that winning service offerings are a certainty.

Some possible examples of services are: traffic news to your handset, delivery tracking, stockwatch, sales-force tracking, taxi services.

In the shorter term, AOL and Yahoo have announced availability of their clients on the Blackberry devices and are forming partnerships with mobile service providers. There are also a number of IM start-ups that are concentrating solely on wireless.

There is some debate in the world of IM about standardisation of protocols. Take a look in the About SIP section on Related Protocols

Other aspects of presence

In addition to IM, the capabilities of presence will be widely exploited in SIP-based services. As the services running on communications devices are converging, presence information can be used to manage services across different platforms. Instead of indicating presence purely in terms of a PC, presence information can apply to a number of devices and contexts, from traditional IM clients, to mobile devices, to voicemail and email, and plain dumb telephones. Furthermore, there is an increasing trend toward extending presence to independent applications, not just human users, and enabling everything from automatic alerts and notifications to database queries via an instant messaging interface. For example, IBM uses a system of "bots" - buddy lists representing databases and corporate directories and there are a number of start-ups specifically looking at similar ideas.

Presence goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of voice services. A network that has dynamically updated information about a user's preferences and availability can perform more intelligent call routing than today's PSTN or existing find-me/follow-me services. Presence makes the telephone more effective both by adding dynamic information about the user to the static address of the device and by placing it in a broader context of devices. The engaged tone could be a thing of the past with the use of buddy lists.