I am finally getting a chance to sit down and relax for a few moments. I have just had one of my longest stints away on conference and holidays in a long time. It started with the Microsoft Partner Conference, followed by Tech Ed and then a camping holiday on the Murray…

The Partner Conference was hosted at the Gold Coast Exhibition Centre in Broadbeach. The week started with a Keynote that i actually got a lot out of. With a strong view on winning in compete scenarios the message was clear. More Seats! Microsoft has a very strong commitment to winning more seats over competitors such as Google, Notes etc.

They have raised the bar with $9.5 billion (US Dollars) in research for this year. Yep that’s right that is and will continue to be the largest research budget…. The head researcher Phillip Faucett was out to tell us about the latest technological trends and the shift being seen in technology and the way we interact with it. Demo’s on new concepts that allow the user to interact with their pc using hand gestures alone. The new Microsoft Surface that doesn’t require touch, you simply use your hands above the unit to gesture what you want to happen.

Anyway back to the business benefit. There were many session I attended that need a mention here;

• How to get 5 times the sales with no additional sales people
• The new partner network
• Smart Hiring
• Selling Exchange 2010
• The Corporate Accounts Team

While they are only a few session I attended, the most part of the conference was all about networking. Networking with partners that are similar to our business, and partners who we would be able to win joint business with. A lot of new connections were made and I have already started to have meetings with potential business partners.

Selling the Microsoft stack was another clear message. The Microsoft Stack… now there is an understatement. Microsoft has some 112 products that fall under the stack. Everything from the desktop and office platform to hosted SQL and cloud based computing.

That was the first week down and then Tech Ed started. The first two days were a deep dive into the Exchange 2010 platform. I must say that it was a rather disappointing two days, death by PowerPoint followed by labs that did not work. The presenter did his best to keep the class engaged but nothing seemed to go well. I managed to get the High Availability lab to work; I created a DAG across three Exchange servers and failed three databases between them. It actually worked!

After the first couple of deep dive days Tech Ed was official open. The first few sessions I attended were around Windows 7 desktop deployment and the new 2008 R2 server platform. Now Released!

I met a few of our customers there and got to know them a lot better as well as uncover some new opportunities .

The week was filled with very informative sessions with some key new product updates and features;

• Data Protection Manager
• Windows 7
• Office 2010
• 2008 R2
• Exchange 2010
• Branch Cache
• Direct Access
• Bit Locker to Go
• Hyper-V R2
• Forefront TMG

Overall the two weeks were exhausting but well worth while…

So after two solid weeks of learning, networking and entertaining customers I needed a break… off to Burham! I got back on the Friday and left early Saturday for a 4 day camping trip. Packed the new Black Wolf Turbo 300 tent and the camping gear and we headed off.

From one extreme to another, going from all the latest software and technologies to sitting in my chair with a rod in one hand and beer in the other. I caught my first Murray Cod, coming in at around 35cm… Nothing to write home about but it was still my first. Not a lot of technology around in Burham although I did have surprisingly great Next G coverage (Go Telstra!).

The nights were cold and our air mattress had a hole in it. But it was still great!

Then it was back to work for a few days to see that week out and now I am sitting in the Emirates lounge about to board a plane to New Zealand for a few days to re-configure a network.

Travel

Travel seems to always be mentioned whenever an ROI is done on communications. The discussions were based mostly around the fact that travel is an easy value to quantify and provides a hard ROI.

Pros;

• Easy to quantify
• Provides a hard ROI

Cons;

• Been used by many people before
• Not always believed
• Travel is required in many organisations so you wont eliminate it all together
• Travel in many cases only accounts for a samll % of the company total spend

Conferencing

Conferencing has been a major player since the advent of the conference bridge in R2. It has been the sole basis to an OCS implementaiton in quite a few customer implementations. Many organisations are using hosted conference services provided by many carriers and third party vendors. Such conferencing solutions are in some cases hard to use and in most cases very costly.

The group talked about all of the new features within OCS and how it would be easy to come up with an ROI based on conferencing costs. For organisations who currently use a third paty service the savings are instant. For organisations new to conferencing, this will give you the power to collaborate and communicate with your peers in real-time.

Presence / IM

Presence for me would be the biggest cost saving. While it is much harder to justify and to proove upfront in an ROI model it definately is worth spending time on.

The world without presence as many people are familar with today is a world where communicating with people is done in a scenario similar to that below. This is an example presented on the night by Dean from C2C;

“Mike works in the customer service team and needs to get a hold of an engineer to assist a customer with an issue they are experiencing. In this case he attempts to call Edmund who Mike regularly uses to help him out with technical issues. When Mike calls edmund it goes to voicemail so he leaves a message. He then tries Edmund on his mobile and this also goes to voicemail so he leaves another message. Mike needs an answer urgently so he also tries sending Edmund an e-mail. This process has taken some 15 minutes to complete and Mike still has no response. Edmund then checks his voiemails / e-mail when he is next available (5-8 minutes) and then responds to Mike.”

In a world with presence….

“Mike looks up the engineering department and sees that Edmund is in a meeting but Justin is available. While Mike hasent really used Justin in the past he is in the same team so he tries him anyway. Mike gets his resultive answer in a matter of minutes and the customer is happy!”

While the above is obviously taken from a “test scenario” the fact remains that with presence the entire process is streamlined. Some rough calculations done on the night would see an average user saving  between 15-20 minutes a day with presence (4 minutes per attempt to communicate X 4-5 times a day = 15-20 minutes). This on average would save the company almost 5 working days per employee per year! To take this further you could even account for time gained by the engineer by not having to listen and respond to the messages.

Live Meeting

Live meeting for some organisations has enabled ROI to be done on areas of the business like training new employees and even delivering communications and messages to partners and customers. A typical large enterprise will have an on-boarding process which will involve an introduction to the companies systems and processes. Training can either be offered live of through pre-recorded sessions posted on the company intranet.

Schools are using Live Meeting to deliver a virtual class-room experience betwwen schools within the state, country and even overseas!

In Summary

To summarise there were lots of other discussions had and topics covered and the ones mentioned above were the main areas for ROI. There was a great presentation done by Dean Howarth from C2C. I will see if i can grab it off him and post it as there was some great slides on surveying the workforce and how to best approach an ROI for OCS and UC in general.

For those people who attended I thankyou for your input and contrabution to the session. For those of you who didn’t I hope you are able to make it next time!

Links

Here are some useful links and resources that you can use in building an ROI. Thanks to the group for these links.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/518942/Unified-Communications

http://whitepapers.theregister.co.uk/paper/view/405/0803-uc-primer.pdf

ROI Calculator – Coming Soon

C2C Presentation – Coming Soon

As always…another poll.