Thanks for all the great feedback on the iPhone launch post yesterday. Don't worry, I won't abandon any new gadget news, but I stumbled across this really cool OCS appliance at a friend's blog this morning.
StartReady is based in Amsterdam and, to my knowledge, the first to offer a Microsoft OCS-based UC appliance. Their site is a little light on details but Joachim Farla's blog post dives deeper into the solution. There seems to be 4 offerings. One each for standard and enterprise editions of OCS then a virtual version of each, assumably running on Server 2008 Hyper-V.
According to the article they claim it can be setup and configured in under 2 hours. Their strategy seems to build an abstraction layer that is presented in a very simple way then goes about doing all the heavy lifting on its own. In fact, in scouring the StartReady website I don't see a single screenshot of the OEM OCS anywhere. The OCS management console isn't difficult, but the StartReady console would be more simple for non-experts to complete. I have to wonder if any advanced functionality/configuration is hidden or unavailable through this solution.
Here's a full rundown of out of the box features:
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Check out my last post on the launch of the iPhone 2.0
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Alex Lewis has been involved in the high tech industry for more than 15 years, from satellite antenna design to to executive IT management. He has been a co-author or contributing author for books on Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, Windows 2003 R2 and Microsoft Technical Specialist Exam Guides. Alex is a senior consultant at Convergent Computing, an IT consulting firm specializing in Microsoft technologies. Alex is involved in many early adopter and TAP programs, working with new technology often 2-3 years before public release. Alex is also a CISSP and leads Convergent's Security and Unified Messaging practices in the field.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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1.5 hour
The appliance can be deployed within 1.5 hours of time and completely configured as well.
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