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.

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There are many devices now certified, optimised and designed for use with Office Communicator. It is no longer a requirement for users to have to have a headset. A lot of people believe that if you are going to be running a softphone on your PC then you need to use a headset (and look like a call centre agent). This is not the case. There are a wide range of devices out there that look like a handset while are still connected to your PC.

I wanted to put together some recommendations that I have on each device and where its good and bad points are. I am fortunate enough to have vendors give me devices to test and comment on as we are now running all of the OCS services and are deploying communicator to many organisations as their replacement to their PBX.

That being said it would take too long to go through each device so i am going to pick some of the more popular and up-coming devices out there. At the time of writing this blog I am using the soon to be released Voyager Pro headset by Plantronics so i will start with that.

Device: Voyager Pro (due for release Q4 2009 / Q1 2010)

Category: Wireless Headset

Pros:

• Great looking device.
• Very comfortable to wear. I have been wearing it for almost a week solid and dont find it unconfortable. I am one of those people who hate having headphones in my ears. This device is surprisingly comfortable and light weight.
• Great battery life. I have had it for 6 days and only charged it once. Talk time is claimed to be 6 hours of actual talk time. I am yet to have a flat battery.
• This unit works wth my mobile and my PC at the same time. It didnt come wth the USB dongle but i had one from the Savi Go and that seemed to pair up ok.
• The switching between mobile and PC is also very well done. It seems to know which device i want to answer so all i need to do is press the button on the headset. Very Star Trek…
• Audio Clarity is also great. It is one of the first wireless devices designed for speech recognition. (and it actually works….exchange now understands me!)

Cons:

• I would have to start by saying the range is very poor. While i have not used  bluetooth devices before i would strugle to get 25 metres out of it. I am used to using DECT. This bluetooth doesnt even come close to the range of DECT.

I actually quite like this device. The only problem I had was that it didnt come with the USB dongle for your PC so I used another plantronics one that I had. They are going to be shipping this when they are officially released so no problems there.

As usual I have put another poll below. Please take the time to complete it.

The interface is definately an improvement with the Office Ribbon now present in all of the applications. It did take me some time to get used to the ribbon in 2007 but now that it is in every program in 2010 is definately makes things more productive.

I am still yet to find a copy of MS project but i now have Sharepoint designer, the standard office suite (word, excel, powerpoint, outlook) and visio. Being a network engineer Visio is like my right arm. It is now a lot more stable and seems to allow me to get something laid out very quickly. The new design themes and again the ribbon make this very easy to use.

I can definately see the most changes in outlook. At a quick snapshot;

• Conversation View (loved how it did it for all of my past e-mails)…. no more reply and forwards to trail through.
• Office Ribbon
• Team and Manager quick steps(allows me to mail my team, make a meeting for my team and the same with managers with the click of a button)
• My OCS contact list is now populated into a neat little window within the to-do bar space.
• Calendars are now nicely grouped
• Contacts will pop-up as a little toast window that shows their photo and contact information. If they are a communicator contact then you will see their presence and meeting availability.
• You can create your own custom quick steps for tasks you used to manually do.

The real test will come when I write up a few proposals and use excel to its full potential. I will let you know how I go!

This is an easy poll this time. Please take the time to complete it.

I have lots to talk about and opinions on just about everything so what to choose first. The first thing that came to mind was to talk about OCS 2007 R2 and the adoption in the Australian VoIP market place.

Lets face it OCS 2007 R2 is a PBX replacement. While it doesn’t offer everything a PBX can,  in many scenarios it goes above and beyond the desktop integration capabilities of any PBX vendor i have seen “Who best to integrate with Microsoft than Microsoft?”.

Many of my colleagues in all areas of the communication industry comment on OCS not being ready and it lacking in many areas and functions of a PBX. I challenge you this;

• If you are used to having a button on your traditional handset that allows you to listen to your music on hold source while you work then maybe you should be changing the way you listen to music… (iPod, Internet radio, Zune, media centre….)
• If you like to monitor other users extensions and answer calls on their behalf – Set them up as a team call group in OCS.
• If you need to be able to log into an ACD queue or be active in other call distribution methods – Create a response group and setup the Agent Tab in your communicator client.
• If you are after reporting and usage of OCS like Call Detail Records, Archiving etc… – Deploy a QoE server. The QoE server has some of the most detailed reporting metrics i have ever seen for a voice platform. Not only does it give you a full call history it also tells you what bit-rate your audio was being sent / received at as well as the device you used for the call and the frame rate and resolution of your video….need more detail than that?

The message i want to get across to the users and sceptics out there is that OCS 2007 R2 is ready to be adopted by 95% of the organisations out there. Yes it will make you think about doing things differently within your business, but the thing to remember is that change is a good thing.

It will also drive a positive culture shift within your organisation.  Us younger “Y gens”… are used to having things NOW… we dont like waiting and why should we when we are able to use such communication tools to increase our productivity and availability.

The major success that you will have is with the ability to control that cultural change. You are able to determine when your organisation and its users are ready to make the shift from handset to “anything”. I say anything because there are hundreds of certified OCS devices out there. You are not restricted to a headset, handset, DECT, blue-tooth, round table, web cam….the list goes on;

• If your users are used to picking up  physical device. Buy a CX200, CX700, SNOM 300 series…. 
• If they want to use a headset there are endless choices.

If anyone out there has a scenario where OCS will not fit today then please I would love to hear about it. I am more than happy to post them on my blog and keep you updated with solutions that will allow you to still deploy OCS. Maybe this can even turn into a wish list to the Microsoft Product Team…who knows.

One last thing that i will try and do with each post is provide a Poll so please take the time to complete it.

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