SAN FRANCISCO -- Cisco's highly publicized cooperation with Microsoft on unified communications will focus on sharing presence information as well as on voice mail, Web conferencing and other areas, a Cisco executive said Tuesday.

Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged last month to make their companies' technologies work together even as they compete in areas such as voice call control. Details of the effort have been scarce, and some critics have called the Webcast promise a mere show of peace between two companies struggling over the lucrative communications and collaboration business.

Unified communications is a buzzword for combining all forms of IP communications, making them accessible on a single client or from within applications. Because all voice calls, text messaging, videoconferences and online collaboration can be controlled by software, Microsoft is pitted against Cisco and longtime telecom vendors in the battle for this market.

Rick McConnell, Cisco's executive sponsor of the partnership in the unified communications area, outlined one key objective of the effort in a meeting with reporters Tuesday. Cisco now federates all the presence and availability information from its unified communications systems and publishes that data to Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS), which can then push it to Microsoft clients. Microsoft doesn't reciprocate. The companies are working on making the same kinds of information go from Microsoft's software into Cisco's, said McConnell, who is vice president and general manager of Cisco's unified communications business unit.

The way it is now, if an enterprise uses Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call control software and an employee picks up the phone, a colleague's Microsoft Office Communicator messaging client will show that employee as being on the phone. But if an employee indicated in Office Communicator that she was away from her desk, that information wouldn't show up on a colleague's Cisco IP phone. Making federated presence work both ways will make that possible, McConnell said.

Cries for cooperation are rampant among Cisco's customers, according to McConnell.

"I'm on the phone with at least one customer per day . . . that's asking us about our Microsoft integration road map," McConnell said. Cisco's network domination and Microsoft's software role make that inevitable. "We're going to interoperate, frankly, in almost every account that we participate in," he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.