Building Productivity-Boosting Applications for Your Cisco IP Phones
The Cisco IP phone, an integral part of the Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data) IP telephony solution, is a new breed of phone—more an Internet appliance than a standard telephone. In addition to the usual phone features, Cisco IP phones can be used for data entry and lookup, call accounting, information delivery, and much more. Like a PC, it can be customized and configured to help solve your organization's unique business problems, increase productivity, and even generate revenue. How far you can expand the role of your Cisco IP phone is bounded only by your own imagination.
Unlike traditional business telephone sets, Cisco IP phones use XML over HTTP to communicate with Web servers for information retrieval and content generation. By hitting any compatible Web server, a Cisco IP phone can download the information stored there just as if it were a PC. By interfacing applications such as LotusNotes with services on Cisco IP phones, you can accomplish the tasks you need to make phone users more productive and increase the return on your Cisco AVVID IP telephony investment.
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FIGURE 1: Cisco IP Phone 7960 displaying the SERVICES menu.