Moving towards truly Unified Communications
***edited with working link***
I had to miss the live streaming show from San Francisco last night as I had to sit on an online Chat between the IT Evangelists and the UK MVPs. My participation in the chat kept me too busy to truly multi task so I had to watch the recorded stream today instead. We've been getting hints internally about the announcements for some time now, and as I've got a foot in both camps technically so to speak, the news made a lot of sense. We've been working towards this announcement for some time now. Remember earlier on this year when the Exchange team merged with the Real Time Collaboration Team? well, the convergence (can I use that word without offending the purists?) of the 2 teams led to us speculating internally about an announcement like this. And it's good news - as most of the posts I've read today seem to confirm..
As Dave and Deepak and several others put it:
It doesn't matter whether you are the chairman of the world's largest software company, a salesperson at a medium-sized manufacturer or the receptionist at a small startup, there's one workplace scenario we are all familiar with. It starts when you need to reach a colleague quickly. First you look up their phone extension and give them a call, only to be directed to their voicemail. After you leave a message, you find their mobile phone number and leave a second message. Next, you send an email. If you happen to be in a meeting when your colleague gets your messages and tries to reach you, the process repeats itself, but from the other direction.
I don't agree with Alec's comment about renaming of Microsoft Exchange to "Communications Server" however. We've just gone through the process and hassle of renaming Exchange 12 to Exchange 2007 and wouldn't want to go through that again. We'd have just stayed with Exchange 12 wouldn't we? (see the press release for all of the official titles)...
And blending phones with computers? We've been doing that for some time now :-) You need to see the UM demo again. If you want to watch the stream from yesterday - here's the link to the event...
You know, I always knew I had a really interesting technology to look after - now my job is going to get even more interesting. And I'm really looking forward to it...