Unified Communications Launches on 10/16 in San Francisco!
The Unified Communications Platform launched Wednesday, Oct. 16th in San Francisco. That platform includes OCS 2007, OC 2007 and Exchange SP1. I attended the launch as a presenter, presenting a session on the platform SDKs for the IT Pro/IT management audience, as well spending time talking with attendees about the UC products/platform.
I was really happy to see/feel the excitment that attendees had for the products. I'm really looking forward to spreading that excitment to the developer community (which is what gets me out of bed in the morning - well, with the help of an alarm clock).
Some highlights and thoughts below.
Keynote:
Billg and Jeff Raikes kicked off the day with a keynote that drove home the point that software driven communications will change the world of communications in the same way (and to the same magnitude) that the PC changed the world of computing. The goal of the UC platform SDKs is to create an ecosystem of value added software for this new communications paradigm much in the same way we saw with the PC.
The keynote backed up this point with great scenario driven demos and case studies. I realize the comparison between the PC revolution and software driven communications is a lofty one, but watch the keynote and post your thoughts here.
I liked the point Bill Gates made about the "democratization of communications". Moving a traditional PBX phone is often a very manual (and very costly) proposition. With UC, moving a phone is as easy unplugging it from one Ethernet port and plugging it into another. That's the most concrete example of the flexibility of software (vs. hardware) driven communications. The keynote offers others.
The same applies to writing communications based applications. How many of us developers know how to programatically control their PBX to launch/control/integrate voice calls? Chances are if they do, the code doesn't look like anything else they do in Visual Studio, or any other tool.
That's different with the UC SDKs. You can launch a call with a few lines of .NET code just by automating Communicator. That's some pretty powerful stuff... I'll blog some code here in the next few days to showcase what I mean...
Sessions:
Kirt Debique (GM, OC Platform & Solutions Mgmt), Albert Kooiman (Sr. TPM) and I presented Extensibility: Embedding Unified Communications in LOB Applications. In this session we presented a Sharepoint sight that showcased our some of our key platform capabilities for integrating communications into solutions. Those include:
· Presence and Contextual Collaboration: Presence is providing users information about whether a contact is online and available for communications. Using prebuilt sample controls, embedding presence within applications provides developers the opportunity to allow users to communicate quickly from within the application. Contextual Collaboration is using presence to launch communication sessions using IM, voice, video or conferencing and integrating information the from a system as context for the communication. This is analogous to the integration of OC 2007 within Outlook 2007. When you click “Reply with IM” you know the presence of the contacts on the To: and Cc: lines (even if they aren’t in your contact list) and can start a conversation with those contacts interjecting context (the title of the email in the title bar of the conversation window and the link in the message body) to quickly bootstrap the conversation. Developers use the presence controls to embed Presence wherever they present a name in an applications and use the control to interject context based on information in the system (customer records, sales data, etc.). The presence controls support WinForms and web via an ActiveX control.
· Information Access: Using communications such as IM or voice provides mobile users quick and secure access to enterprise data regardless of location. This is enabled via IM Bots (services that provide presence like any OC contact and an IM UI to provide access to backend data via an IM Conversation) and voice applications using OCS 2007 Speech Server. Using both these technologies to provide nontraditional IM or voice UIs provides developers the abilities to provide information access in ways that they couldn’t in the past. With IM bots, a user can access information anywhere they can access OCS 2007 (outside the firewall or with Communicator Web Access using a browser) and have a secure connection back to their data. Speech Server turns any phone to an extension of an enterprise app much in the way that the Microsoft Exchange Autoattendant provides access to email, vmail and calendaring via voice. We also discussed using Exchange Web Services to access the Exchange data store (email, calendar, free/busy, vmail, etc.) as a means to provide information access.
· Business Process Communications: Much of the latency within a business process is human latency. Think about trying to get your expense report cleared through your manager. A lot of that time is waiting to get him/her to sign off on the report (or get back to you about that golf outing you expensed). Communications can accelerate these processes by reducing that human latency. Using Windows Workflow Foundation and OCS 2007 Speech Server’s voice capabilities (text to speech and speech recognition) or IM (either through IM Bots or by alerting users to changes in state via broadcast IM) allows developers to reach users more quickly and in the right context to drive business processes.
Overall, the session was well received. It's pretty exciting stuff. I'm going to post some questions we got in the session with answers early next week, but I thought I'd provide some details on what we presented/demoed. The slides for this session and other topics here. Streaming videos (which I'm *super excited* about) is coming soon.
I have friends that live for pulling minor flubs in a demo/presentation and playing them for you in a loop. Which, I personally find *hilarious*.
Cool:
- Gibson Guitars: Gibson is an early adopter of UC and had a video showing their experience. They built a custom Les Paul guitar with the UC logo (“Unified/Simplified”) on the body. This guitar was played during the keynote kick off and then signed by Bill Gates and Jeff Raikes and given to one of the attendees of the executive roundtable session. Attendees were still talking about it during our session, the last of the day. I don't play, but thought it was really cool nonetheless.
- Sledgehammer Demo: I love the effective use of a sledgehammer during a demo and the Exchange SP1 team provided a great example. During their demo of continuous replication they showed a live failover by setting up CRS on a server and then cutting the network connection, pulling the power, flipping the server rack on its side and then taking a sledgehammer to the server and it’s drives. Gasps were heard across the room throughout the demo and attendees were really impressed with the easy restoration of data without tape backup, etc. The art of the demo is alive and well. Nice one, Ed.
I'll post some more details (questions we fielded) and follow up code next week.
Have a great weekend!