Cisco Telepresence is the latest thing when it comes to communications over IP technology. Some of you may have seen this in the latest season of the hit TV show ‘24′ where the President is speaking to the Russian Premiere.

Basically, you have a ‘conference room’ set-up with your typical Cisco Voice Handset along with several large, high definition plasma screens. What this allows you to do, is have a full conference split across multiple locations. Anyone at the remote site is displayed in full high definition at the end of your table, meaning you are able to read body language as well as speak.

The most impressive part about this is that once the system is set up, it is no more complicated than making a standard voice call. You literally dial the Telepresence enabled extension number and away you go.

Only video can really do this justice, so here you go:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akzNWS5dygQ[/youtube]

Please excuse the Cheesey acting.

More information available here: Cisco Telepresence

Hi All,

We just wanted to give everybody a brief overview of what Cisconews is going to be doing in the coming weeks:

• Cisco News - Hardware, Software and Services.
• Security Bulletins.
• Reviews of Cisco Hardware and Software, not the one paragraph reviews you find out there, where it is clear the reviewer has never even seen the kit. Everybody who works on Cisconews works in the field of network security, with the majority of our work being with Cisco kit. We won’t be pulling any punches here either, if something is bad, we will say so.
• Tips and Tricks - Anything from one line commands in IOS, to tools and software used on a daily basis to manage Cisco products.
• Photo Gallery - It doesn’t sound like such a great idea on the face of it, but we looked around. There is a definite lack of high resolution images of Cisco kit, mostly you see the stock images published by Cisco. What we aim to do with the gallery, is provide close up shots so that people can see what interfaces/buttons/LEDs each of the products has. This can be handy when supporting a device you have never seen before!
• Discussions, both in the blog comments section and in our forums (not yet live). Hopefully this will attract some debate/community problem solving and a place to share issues.
• Configuration guides - These will primarily be aimed at the beginner. More advanced users are more likely to hit http://www.cisco.com and find whatever technical documentation they need. We are going to attempt to get step-by-step guides with Screenshots, in semi-laymen’s terms so that people can grasp this stuff quickly.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to leave them below. We value your feedback.

Thanks,

The CiscoNews Team.