I attended an online seminar today on Cisco’s Unified Mobile Communicator, Cisco’s plan to put the “unified” communications environment (corporate directory, phone, voicemail, presence, conferencing, and e-mail) all on your data/application-enabled cell phone.

You can view the product information for Unified Mobile Communicator here.

Two things make this solution unattractive.

One, it’s tightly-coupled and Cisco-proprietary. It’s locked in with Cisco’s products–Unity unified messaging, Meeting Place, and of course Call Manager. What if I want to connect to another voicemail or e-mail server? And from what I can tell from the presentation, it’s not using standard protocols such as SIP or IMAP to communicate with home base.

Two, it requires a big pile of new hardware in the datacenter to make it work. This needs to be integrated into the individual component servers (Unified Communications Manager/CallManager, Unity, MeetingPlace).

The first thing will keep Penn State away from this mobile communications solution. Penn State does not use unified messaging (our Unity setup is voicemail-only) which removes both the VM and e-mail functionality. We don’t use Meeting Place. What’s left then besides having voice capabilities? Yes, your cell phone already does that. Forward your VoIP phone to your cell and be mobile.

Mobile users at PSU can put together a suite of tools for their data-enabled cell devices to send and receive e-mail (POP/IMAP), instant-message (various protocols), and search the corporate directory (LDAP) but are for now without a way to tightly integrate with the campus PBX or voicemail.