Conversationware

Microsoft has been talking about Unified Communications for a while, and I keep an eye out for the detail.

A good summation here from Mark Dea, from Microsoft, who’s post about piloting OCS I found on my persistent search (radar) for Unified Communications - isn’t search and RSS combined an extremely useful technology?

Anyhow, thanks for the detail Mark. The feature I liked the look of most was

“I have found myself answering more calls than usual,  the reason being is that when I email someone and they phone me back,  it includes the subject title along with the call.  Even if the call doesn’t have a subject,  I can easily see who is calling now as it picks them name out of my contacts like it would on my mobile phone.”

This adds to communications as it stands today, and is only the beginning of UC. Making instigation of conversations ‘topic based’ will enhance productivity no end.

For example, I can imagine that when I make contact with someone in the future, as well as being highlighted with the foremost subject, it will be accompanied by a list of all the sharepoint work areas that we inhabit in common.

I was also very impressed at the association of Microsoft Office Server 2007 with 28 Days Later, a film about a deadly virus that swept the UK and turned most people into slavering zombies….or was that just the Comms industry? 

It looks like classic subtle British humour, but I guess it could have been entirely coincidental.

One of the big benefits to installing a VOIP telephone system is that you can build in resilience. The ability to provide service in case of failure or disaster is behind most decisions.

However, might you want to transmit a fax between sites?

Or, to put it a different way, might you may want to transmit an analogue modem signal, either 9.kbps - 14.4kbps, or 33.6kbps ,over an 8.0kbps channel?

Uh oh.

You ought to know compression and encryption are just no good when it comes to an analogue modem signal, and inbound fax across the IP network just doesn’t work consistently in any manner.

SO, what to do?

Well, what normally happens at this point is that ‘fax’ is handled locally per site. With logic, and funds, dictating the use of a ‘fax server’ instead of manual and paper based faxing, this can often ‘logically’ lead to the installation of multiple fax servers, with incumbent multiple bits of tin, multiple software licences, mutliple fax interconnect kit with distributed user databases and pockets of important documents on each of your sites.

Immediately going back to the reason for implementing VOIP - you care a great deal about resilience and redundancy - this now becomes an issue for your very important documents (PO’s, orders, contracts etc) which reside on multiple servers.

Do you fancy supplying redundancy for 6 fax servers across all of yours sites - isn’t that 12 servers alltogether? Not forgetting that six fax servers are utilising client software that is looking at 6 different server IP addresses. Good grief.

Let’s separate this out. Outbound fax is simple to deploy, because you can generate documents to be sent out from a central location. The modem signal only comes after the documents arrive at the fax server.

So, inbound fax is the only real question here.

A lot of VOIP gateways are now available that support the local termination of an inbound fax, ie. pretend to be the fax machine.

They will do one of two things

1. - SMTP into email accounts.

Easy, but if you want to ever find documents again in the future, then this is not ideal

2. - transmit the document to a central fax server resource using T.38 protocol

Why T.38? This is to preserve the real time nature of faxing, so to eliminate the analogue signal, but still provide all of the acknowledgements that sending fax machines expect.

This is far better than any store and forward approach.

T.38 Gateways can be the VOIP manufacturer’s, or you can deploy separate gateways if you care to.

The bottom line is that with one server you can now take advantage of all that SAN hardware you swore would come in useful one day. Install your single faxing database on that and you have resilient nirvana.

There is a seeming contradiction between features and simplicity those of us ‘involved’ in software will be thinking about more often than not, whether users ourselves, or whether responsible for inflicting technology on other people.

Making things more simple will help adoption, perceived value, and drive reference sites and sales, but how do you achieve that without sacrificing features?

Some thoughts on this simplicity vs features are collated from some very clever people here from Luke W, an interface designer.

This strikes a chord with Unified Communications interfaces based on one of the comments that “prior knowledge makes things appear more simple”. An example here from the 10 laws of simplicity (more…)

This time next year Rodney……..(for Only Fools and Horses fans)

This linked article from Red Herring shows Jajah has linked up with eHarmony dating site - I wonder who made the first move?

Whoever, it’s a great idea, and the service will presumably hide your number from people you’re not sure you want to know! I picked this snippet up from Alec of Iotum who also looks to treat voice only as a component part of a wider application.

The article, and Jajah’s website shows their burgeoning integrations list, and I feel this will be absolutely key to winning mindshare in the voice application market…even the hosted one.

In fact, voice right now is very reminiscent of the early fax market.

The market in the early 90’s seemed to be dominated by Unix based proprietary systems - check out this quote from Network Computing in the 90’s

Fax servers today are more or less tied to the software delivered with them, at least on the server side. Some fax servers support the Communications Applications Specification (CAS) and can therefore work with a desktop application that supports CAS. So to an extent, you can plug in the desktop client of choice, but you may end up losing some of the unique abilities of the server (such as sharing common phone books or accounting).

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Being in business is fast becoming a celebrity shoot out.

Isn’t buying an iPod very similar to calling a number and voting for our favourite singer, dancer, aspiring business person, whatever? ….It’s a contract, we buy, and Steve Jobs promises to come back next week to entertain and delight us with his designs and deliver us a unique experience.

I’m tempted to compare the iPhone purchase to a tactical vote - because ’the public’ likes the look of the current vote leaders even less. Looking at it like that, then it’s no suprise people will pay more ($550) to keep their favourite in the game. It’s just the equivalent to phoning in twice.

On some mass level, the public longs to buy into and be a part of the corporate celebrity story, if only to give it more legs (cue a kate moss clothing joke), and give us the next chapter in the soap that is corporate stardom.

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First, frame the problem.

Whatever your definition of Unified Communications, (this link is my own ‘What is unified Communications’ approach), there is an inescapable conclusion that in order to make software based communications work good, you have to find, and then telephone enable (all) your contacts.

Only one problem, and that is, the possible inbound and outbound contact details you might need are literally all over the shop.

• Customer Relationship Management systems
• Accounts software
• Outlook or Notes personal address book
• Global address book
• Your mobile phone
• Paperwork
• Web
• A colleagues’ version of the above

Of course, these contacts increase exponentially with the number of social software platforms that you’re using such as linkedin and facebook.

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Apparently the lucky americans have a new device called the ‘iPhone’ and they’re all going potty over the fancy new facility called visual voicemail.

For the rest of us, here’s a taste

Funny, looks a bit like our company’s Unified Messaging system, CallXpress, on a Blackberry to me. We’ve had that for quite some time already! Steve Jobs = magic wand over wallet

My wife uses a Virgin Media mobile phone and was having trouble with the voicemail

Because I work at something vaguely to do with telecoms and communications, my wife, along with the rest of my family and friends, postman and milkman, assume I know everything about everything with a plug or a battery, including mobile phones.

I spent the same amount of time that she did reading the manual and then called the helpline. Two days later, I discovered what had been going wrong and it was fixed.

So, Hero status wasn’t attained, but I noted that all that was required to log into my wifes voicemail was by the device calling its own number. (more…)

The age of ‘Presence’ is on us, with the requisite promises of unlimited contact potential.

A couple of Microsoft attributed quotes lately on the subject

For example, many of the features implemented in a PBX are intended to ensure that calls are not missed and/or do not end up in voicemail: so-called “find-me, follow-me” features. Unified communications uses a fundamentally different paradigm to address the underlying customer need

And another one

Presence based communications: you only attempt to communicate with someone who is advertising their willingness and ability to communicate with you at any given moment

OK, so, I can see the point. Instant messaging is a great overlay, and will give us the very important ability to know if someone is available at their desk.

So, wouldn’t it be neat if Unified Communications could tell me if you’re on the phone? (more…)

This isn’t a proper review or anything, but I have to recommend our new home laptop model, the Sony Vaio FZ11Z, to anyone looking to upgrade from their old machine.

At just less than £1200, it should be good, but I’m truly delighted with everything about it.

Although, by the looks of this photograph, I’m going to have to upgrade the family camera to Higher Definition too. (more…)