VoiceCon San Francisco 2008 opens this week with a flurry of product announcements and demonstrations, so in this week's newsletters we'd like to highlight a few news items that were released in advance of the show. Today, we'll focus on tools designed to improve VoIP and unified communications network planning and management from Mindsharp, NetIQ, NetQoS, and Psytechnics.

Mindsharp, a global education company that specializes in Microsoft enterprise products will be on hand at VoiceCon to discuss its 16-module, five-day comprehensive instructional program available for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 core components. The primary target audience for the course is “OCS administrators who intend to design, implement, and manage OCS 2007 as either a stand-alone implementation or as part of a larger unified communications strategy,” according to the company.

NetIQ, a provider in systems and security management, will showcase its latest release of Vivinet Diagnostics, an analysis tool designed to diagnose and troubleshoot voice quality issues. The latest features add “Layer 2 and 3 path tracing across VLAN configurations and deeper support for Nortel hybridized Ethernet, router and switch data gear,” according to the company’s pre-show disclosure.

NetQoS, a company that specializes in network performance management software and services is launching its latest tools for VoIP monitoring that will expand support for unified communications and provide video quality monitoring. The release also adds “enhanced diagnostics and reporting for Cisco IP telephony environments,” according to the company.

Psytechnics, a voice and video performance management supplier for telecom operators and enterprises will unveil its Experience Manager 4.0. The tool is designed to manage and diagnose video conferencing and voice issues.

Our observations: First, we should point out that management tools aren’t the only thing going on at VoiceCon - we’ll highlight other product announcements next time. But we’re encouraged to see a wide variety of alternatives that help network managers address everything from human factors (with Mindsharp) to unified communications and video performance management across multiple platforms because performance management continues to be a hot button issue for successful deployments. And we encourage enterprise IT managers to intelligently compare the available selection of these tools, deploying those that will best help them sleep a little better at night.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.