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De unifying Unified Communications
By chris dalby | November 20, 2007
On 16th October 2007, Microsoft launched their Unified Communications (UC) vision designed to seriously compete with the market leader in web collaboration, Webex. A long awaited launch with a whole host of features:
Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS)
Office Communicator 2007
Live Meeting 2007
Exchange Hosted Services (EHS)
Round Table and other sexy UC endpoint hardware
The launch
I wasn’t lucky enough to attend the launch in Redmond on 16th October, but I made the OCS launch at Vinopolis in London the day after. One of my first tweets at the OCS launch was:
Unified. Simplified is the tagline. With 20 servers?
This tagline headed a power point deck with a Visio diagram to die for. I wish I had taken a photo, because there must have been 20 servers on the diagram. Each server requiring various certificates and roles configured. It might well be unified, but simplified with that many servers? I think not.
The demo in the session I saw showed how to provision a new user for UC within an enterprise by doing a point and click operation in Active Directory, and as if by magic, UC utopia. While it’s really nice to see the end game, I would have been far more impressed to see a similar demo of configuring federation for Public IM connectivity, or how easy it is to deploy certificates across the range of servers and roles requiring quite advanced configuration to allow communication with the rest of the world. Or how easy it might be to configure OCS to talk to your PBX and enable a truly VOIP experience.
The Microsoft UC offering is compelling
Microsoft’s UC vision does deliver the goods . The product rocks and the features are hard to be beaten by any vendor on the market. But the haphazard way the UC launch has happened has been far from the fault of the product and leaves a lot to be desired from an organisational and rational point of view.
How do I buy Unified Communications?
Microsoft does not sell the hosted UC products, meaning pretty much half the UC offering, and arguably the most important, are not available to buy from Microsoft but from partners and resellers. In the UK, the top level Live Meeting resellers are BT, Verizon and Intercall.
So when you buy a hosted Microsoft UC experience, you are not buying the Microsoft UC vision, but a watered down version of the vision tweaked to suit the service provider according to their contract and agreed terms. Ask a conferencing provider to turn on free VOIP and I’m sure they’ll bend over and say lather me up.
Choosing and finding a partner is confusing and can be a long protracted process to actually track down the right person to speak to inside these vastly sized resellers. Across the board, the resellers have virtually no product knowledge across the range of Microsoft’s UC offerings, which doesn’t lend itself to be Unified. Resellers pick and choose what to sell. So even those resellers offering all the UC products, will probably break the different products between completely separate departments with minimal cross knowledge.
Whatever happened to Live Meeting?
One of the simplest and most innovative parts of the UC offering is Round Table hooked into hosted Live Meeting 2007. This is point and click and the fastest way for any user to be up and running with an incredible system for no network or hardware investment. However, Live Meeting was barely mentioned at all during the UC or OCS launches. So why the silent launch of Live Meeting 2007?
There continues to appear to be no official line regarding the roll out date for existing Live Meeting 2005 customers to be upgraded to the most excellent 2007 service as was widely boasted would happen. Only rumours of release dates and pricing then hasty backtracking and still no pricing or availability.
Brand new customers only.
There are a series of adverts running in the UK where a guy goes into a bank and is told that the advertised deals he saw only apply to “Brand new customers only.” The UC offering from Microsoft comes across like this also. Microsoft is rolling out 60 day trials of Live Meeting 2007 to Joe Public on their website, which means they are confident in the product.
The lack of roll out for existing customers is surely a sign of a disorganised and unplanned launch programme. Major resellers have still not signed contracts, agreed terms, or decided upon pricing and licensing.
The Upgrade
Microsoft have allocated date slots to the hosting providers for upgrading existing 2005 sites to Live Meeting 2007. This means that depending how far your provider is down the food chain, will depend upon when you get Live Meeting 2007. Don’t expect the upgrade process to happen before January 2008.
This is a botched policy and a case of peeking inside the barn door to check whether the horse has bolted and not realising it kicked the back door down a week ago.
The livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft domain was launched months ago. Surely a trial upgrade process designed to pre-run and test the upgrade process. What happened during this process that delayed the roll out?
Unified Communications Endpoints
Microsoft has launched a truly plethora of excellent hardware to accompany the UC launch and designed to work with OCS, Live Meeting, Office Communicator et al. As with the majority of Microsoft hardware, the quality is excellent. The Jabra IP phones and headsets that I have seen are difficult to be beaten by anyone.
Round Table
The most exciting piece of hardware on the market at the moment for communication is Round Table. Nothing comes close to the level of interaction you can get from Round Table. Designed to live in the centre of a board room table or office desk, Round Table will replace your standard Polycom conferencing phone as the bench mark for communicating.
Round Table is an IP phone and 360 degree panoramic camera with voice and eye recognition that follows the active speaker while maintaining a panoramic view of everyone round the table.
Every non Microsoft person I speak to has not heard about Round Table. This is a travesty given the level of interaction and collaboration that this product brings to the video conferencing arena.
Disappointingly, Round Table only works as a web cam when not used with OCS or hosted Live Meeting. It can surely not be long before competitors release their own version of Round Table. At that point, Round Table needs open architecture, similar in concept to Android for mobile devices.
Conclusions
The Microsoft UC vision and products have closed the features gap with Webex the market leader. However the UC launch has been disorganised and has still not completely happened.
The on premise solutions of OCS are, unlike the tagline, far from simplified and require advanced configuration of numerous servers.
Hosted Live Meeting and Round Table are not being shouted about and resellers need to increase their UC knowledge.
Topics: Live Meeting, Tech Watch, Unified Communications |
November 20th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
De unifying Unified Communications
Interesting point at http://www.yellowpark.net
November 20th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
[...] You can read the rest of this blog post by going to the original source, here [...]
November 29th, 2007 at 7:19 am
[...] De unifying Unified Communications at Chris Dalby Untangles Networks (tags: msft redmonkclients uc desktopsharing voip voice) [...]