Verizon Business is expanding and strengthening its unified communications services to help multinational companies, faced with dramatically rising travel costs, collaborate better and improve their business processes.

Unified communications uses Internet protocol networks to integrate various systems, media, devices and applications, allowing for more effective and efficient communications. At the NXTcomm'08 trade show, Verizon Business is announcing the following new features and capabilities of the company's suite of unified communications and collaboration offerings:

• Expansion of the Verizon VoIP portfolio, which provides a foundation for unified communications, to four more European countries -- Spain, Italy, Ireland and Sweden -- bringing the total to 10.
• International expansion of the company's Integrated Communications Package, part of the UC platform, to 10 countries in Europe in local languages and integration with Verizon Conferencing for more efficient collaboration. The service was originally introduced to U.S. customers in August 2007.
• Employment of the newest Microsoft Office Live Meeting platform for Verizon Net Conferencing, including a redesigned interface and support for live video. In addition, Verizon Business is introducing enhanced Web-based tools to better manage conference calls.

With the expansion of its VoIP portfolio in Europe rolling out over the next two months, Verizon Business will make its enhanced ICP offering available to hosted-VoIP customers in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Spain, Italy, Ireland and Sweden. The enhancements will allow corporate employees to more efficiently manage their voice and data communications. From a single user interface, workers can control incoming and outgoing calls, access a single unified voice mail, manage their online presence, send instant messages, synchronize their contacts and calendars, and expand their mobility and teleworking capabilities, including softphone functionality.

ICP users will also be able to manage conference-call scheduling and manage presence to initiate Instant Meeting and Net Conference calls by seeing who is available to invite and participate. They will also be able to import conferencing meeting subscriptions, "drag and drop" conference participants into a meeting scheduler, and schedule single or recurring audio and Net conferences.

Net Conferencing powered by Office Live Meeting makes it easier for large businesses and government organizations to experience the benefits of Web conferencing, whether users are conducting simple impromptu collaboration sessions, formal Web-based meetings, advanced online training or large communication events. Verizon Business is rolling out the new version in phases, and it should be available to all Net Conferencing customers by the end of the summer.

To make conferencing even easier, new Web-based audio conferencing tools will replace the need to download software or plug-ins. Web Moderator for Instant Meeting and Meeting View for moderated conference calls are now available in HTML format. These enhancements are available to customers around the world, with versions in French, German and Japanese becoming available later this summer.

Verizon Business this year will continue to build upon its portfolio of solutions to bring together industry-leading customer premises equipment, software and network-based components to enable enterprises to take full advantage of unified communications and collaboration services.