Microsoft's unified communications announcement

Microsoft’s announcements last week about the availability of Office Communications Server 2007, Office Live Meeting 2007, the Office Communicator client and its Roundtable videoconferencing system flesh out Microsoft’s vision for unified communications in a big way. Building on the unified communications capabilities built into Exchange 2007, the offering provides a unified vision of where Microsoft thinks VoIP and unified communications should go. A key part of the announcement was the fact that 800 third parties have achieved specialization in Microsoft’s unified communications capabilities.

On the positive side, Microsoft’s vision (and that of many other unified communication vendors) clearly makes sense. Being able to integrate all of the different modes of communication into a cohesive whole, the ability to share a common directory and the ability to integrate presence throughout the spectrum of communication tools that people employ is smart. It leads to greater productivity, lower costs and more efficient communication. Just the ability to drag and drop people from a directory in order to set up a conference call can be a big time-saver – how many people do you know who can set up a conference call as efficiently as they can send someone an instant message, for example? Plus, Microsoft dominates most of the pieces that can make this work: the server and desktop operating systems, the application suite, the e-mail server and client, etc.

On the down side, Microsoft and other unified communication vendors face something of an uphill battle on a couple of fronts. First, replacing traditional voice telephony and PBXs with a completely software-based approach (running on Windows Server in the case of Microsoft) is not necessarily an easy decision for many corporate decision makers. Traditional voice telephony is probably the closest any of us will ever come to a technology that offers 100% uptime – replacing it with technology that demonstrates less than that level of reliability won’t be an easy sell in many organizations.

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Microsoft’s announcements last week about the availability of Office Communications Server 2007, Office Live Meeting 2007, the Office Communicator client and its Roundtable videoconferencing system flesh out Microsoft’s vision for unified communications in a big way. Building on the unified communications capabilities built into Exchange 2007, the offering provides a unified vision of where Microsoft thinks VoIP and unified communications should go. A key part of the announcement was the fact that 800 third parties have achieved specialization in Microsoft’s unified communications capabilities.

On the positive side, Microsoft’s vision (and that of many other unified communication vendors) clearly makes sense. Being able to integrate all of the different modes of communication into a cohesive whole, the ability to share a common directory and the ability to integrate presence throughout the spectrum of communication tools that people employ is smart. It leads to greater productivity, lower costs and more efficient communication. Just the ability to drag and drop people from a directory in order to set up a conference call can be a big time-saver – how many people do you know who can set up a conference call as efficiently as they can send someone an instant message, for example? Plus, Microsoft dominates most of the pieces that can make this work: the server and desktop operating systems, the application suite, the e-mail server and client, etc.

On the down side, Microsoft and other unified communication vendors face something of an uphill battle on a couple of fronts. First, replacing traditional voice telephony and PBXs with a completely software-based approach (running on Windows Server in the case of Microsoft) is not necessarily an easy decision for many corporate decision makers. Traditional voice telephony is probably the closest any of us will ever come to a technology that offers 100% uptime – replacing it with technology that demonstrates less than that level of reliability won’t be an easy sell in many organizations.

Second, while Microsoft has some excellent technology, many don’t regard the company as providing the highest level of security. How will decision makers view migrating from their PBX, for example, to a software-based technology that is more likely to be subject to security exploits?

I’d like to get your thoughts on Microsoft’s announcements – please e-mail me with your views.

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