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Welcome to the latest edition of TMCnet’s Unified Communications Software Week in Review – where you’ll find a brief rundown of all the top stories related to UC that happened over the last five days. 

This week, findings from a new report by Strategy Analytics (News - Alert) notes the adoption of Unified Communications like IM, conferencing and social enterprise tools, are increasing the market for business collaboration apps. According to the research firm, the market for these applications will hit more than $12 billion by 2017 as a result.

"Today’s workers need to work smarter and faster in gathering information, soliciting input from a wider and more diverse team, analyzing results, making decisions, and communicating and coordinating action plans," says the report's author Mark Levitt, director of enterprise software and communications at Strategy Analytics.

Also this week, Unified Communications (News - Alert) software provider Fidelus launched Console Operator 2.0. The new software is designed to replace Cisco (News - Alert) Attendant Console and offers users the ability to handle large call volumes and transfer calls to the appropriate user while viewing real-time availability information.

In the education market, Polycom (News - Alert) made headlines with the announcement that it’s RealPresence offering offers distance learning capabilities for classrooms in rural Kansas.

“Deploying RealPresence video systems in the classrooms and the RealPresence Platform in the network, school districts can now pool their resources and deliver innovative and enriching content to students,” says Lisa Blair, director of Student Learning at Greenbush. “Budget cuts have left rural schools with very basic offerings, but through distance learning we’re able to provide advanced and elective classes.”

UC is also becoming a popular choice in higher education. This week, Princeton University also announced it has implemented a Unified Messaging system that will replace its current voicemail system.

Princeton University has recently employed a new unified messaging system to replace its current university voicemail system.

With Microsoft (News - Alert) Unified Messaging the University can now integrate voicemail, E-Mail and calendar functions, easily manage their inbox, set appointments and calendar reminders and thanks to text-to-speech capabilities, even listen and reply to E-Mail messages by phone.

That’s all for this week, so be sure to check back with TMCnet throughout the week for the latest in Unified Communications Software news as it happens. Until next week…