A lot of people are following this blog for more information on Unified Communications. Rightfully so as it's the future of corporate communications infrastructure. The combination of email, IM and universal presence make communicating to coworkers, colleagues and friends easier than ever. Microsoft learning has a lot of online courses than can give you a good technology foundation to start working with it yourself. Right now, they have the Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging course listed for free. I'm not sure how long it will last, so if you're interested, sign up now!
Click here to go to the MS Learning site for the free course.
-Alex
Or ... read the story
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More news about it can be found here. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/082107-microsoft-plans-unified-communications-as.html
thoughts on Microsoft vs. Cisco?
Rand, there's an interesting debate going on about Microsoft versus Cisco in the VoIP space. What are your thoughts about any of this? I saw this comment http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/18622#comment-81126
Is Microsoft going to try and make the hardware? Would it be in Cisco's best interest to give them full access to their APIs?
thanks.
RE: thoughts on Microsoft vs. Cisco?
Cisco is obviously the 800-pound gorilla in the Voip arena. However, I don't see Microsoft competing directly with Cisco in many areas. OCS, though it has voice functionality, is a lot more. I see the target market for OCS being companies that need all the other functionality (IM, presence, UM) and also want some toll-avoidance using director-director VOIP. However, I don't see many of my customers buying OCS just for voice or even primarily for voice at this point in time.
In Rand's previous post he makes some good points on Microsoft's position on voice. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/18406#comments I don't think the partnership with Cisco changes that strategy except to help Microsoft come up to speed faster and Cisco integrate closer and quicker with Windows.
As many here have mentioned in the past, the next version of OCS will likely arrive with the specific enterprise features people are mentioning in the thread you linked.
-Alex
Enjoy your Blog
Hi Rand:
I am one of the very lucky people to win your Exchange 2007 Unleashed book. I had also purchased your book based on the many positive comments it received on the website I purchased it from (I honestly never expected to win but I will share your book with my friend who is also interested in Exchange 2007). I am new to Exchange (all versions) and was looking for the best way to approach the initial learning (the curve). I set-up a server at home and I read the chapter on intalling Exchange 2007 so that seems pretty straight forward. Do you have any recommendations based on the chapters in your book (or other resources in general) what I should read to proceed on my journey - like sometype of learning outline for those new to Exchange? I am very technically proficient with Networking and very familiar for the most part with Server 2003 so those skills are taken care of.
Learning Exchange 2007
Hey Alan, congrats on winning one of the books, we put a lot of time into writing the text based on our real world experience with Exchange that I hope you find it to be extremely valuable, it has gotten great reviews, hopefully we did a good job with it, do let me know!
So where to start, well the book is written in a manner than is "modular", so you read a chapter if you need familiarity with something, or you can just skip a chapter if you already know the stuff in the chapter.
I'd tend to start with Chapter 1 on intro to get a familiarity of what's in Exchange 2007 so you have an idea where to head.
I'd then move to the design / planning chapters that cover planning your Active Directory, your OUs, groups, and sites, etc. If you already have a good handle on AD, then you can pretty much skip off of these areas.
I'd then flip to the installation chapter (or the migration chapter if you want to migrate from an older Exchange to a newer one) and walk thru the process.
Most of the rest of the chapters in the book detail out specific feature areas like Unified Msg voicemail, or SharePoint integration, or policy management, or the like. Great info, but to get Exchange in place, the chapters I note above will get you from 0 to 60 the fastest, and once implement, you can customize the Exchange implementation.
Hopefully that helps out, post questions if there's anything I can assist with!
Rand