Between travel and getting over a killer flu, this update’s been a long time coming. I’ve tried to post from the road, but apparently not everyone got Ballmer’s memo that “Mobile is the future”.
Microsoft’s UC launch event was surprisingly bustling. Although I missed some of the event due to real-world work commitments I ran into people I had no idea were interested in UC. Strangely enough, I never ran into MS UC guru Kevin Engman milling about the crowd. Onto the real topics off the event. I was happy to see the focus shifted to “presence” and away from OCS as a VOIP replacement or a great corporate IM client. Don’t get me wrong, OCS is a lot of things, and often different things to different people, but it’s about presence and presence management. OCS and its associated tools give the user control of how and where to communicate over a variety of mediums through a singular interface. This should be the reason for all the hype. UC is an idea, a great idea, and OCS 2007 that delivers on that promise.
Key is Microsoft is building UC from a strong foundation in AD and Exchange . By positioning OCS to integrate tightly with AD and Exchange, it ups the value proposition and differentiates itself from anything else available. In the next 3-5 years I see OCS as widespread as Exchange is currently. There’s just nothing else close in the marketplace that can compete or offer the same singular interface to so many services. The licensing model and EA bundling makes it a no brainer to deploy in the enterprise and the lower-priced standard edition fits the midmarket while rumors swirl about an upcoming SMB offering.
Everyone seems to be asking “Alex, what was your favorite thing from the Launch?”. Outside of the free copy of OCS2007 standard, I love the [url=http://www.microsoft.com/uc/products/roundtable.mspx]roundtable device[/url].
The roundtable is a conference room speakerphone and video conferencing unit all in one. It offers a 360-degree view of everyone in the room while being able to focus on the speaker, even if the speaker changes. I’ve always been frustrated by traditional video conferencing setups. Either you can’t see everyone in a traditional conference room setting or you can’t tell who is talking. This allows both while also not needing an unwieldy TV and camera setup. The price point, around $3000 IIRC, is attractive for smaller customers and would allow for units in virtually every conference room for larger customers. To me, roundtable finally makes video conferencing a viable “everyone” option. [url=http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/8/f/78f7baf8-f80a-4d87-8edb-236bc3977617/Microsoft%20RoundTable%20Datasheet.pdf] More info here[/url].
