Siemens (News - Alert) Enterprise Communications Group this week announced a new capability that marries social networking phenomenon Twitter and its own OpenScape unified messaging solution to allow tagged words in Tweets to launch or otherwise direct various types of communications sessions.

 

With this functionality an individual could use Twitter to broadcast that he’s landed in San Francisco, for example, and is now available for a conference call now. If that user were to tag (News - Alert) the words “conference call now,” the Tweet could not only alert his select user group of the arrival, it could also in its wake trigger OpenScape to launch a conference call with that group. Similarly, the system could use keywords paired with rules-based presence to garner that the user’s announcement of his arrival was a queue to send all calls to voicemail for a half hour after his arrival so he’d have a chance to grab lunch and make his way to his destination.

 

But OpenScape’s hooks into Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg, says Adrian Brooks, vice president of large enterprise and application strategy at Siemens. Social networking capabilities related to other sites could easily be linked with OpenScape, which is based on open standards including SIP, SOAP and XML. In fact, he says, it took just two weeks to do the Twitter integration.

 

Additionally, Siemens says OpenScape now is accessible via the cloud model, allowing organizations to use software development kits to create such mash-ups and test them in the cloud environment. For a small hourly per instance price, developers can run development and production instances of OpenScape software.