Conversationware

This is one of those ‘prediction’ posts for comms solution companies.

Talking to a couple of integrator partners today about the change of IPT solutions from hardware to software, and about software upgrade renewal plans, it became clear there are issues bubbling away for the unwary.

These maintenance and support plans are designed to give the customer a better deal on continuous upgrades, and encourage a well supported customer base - presumably to higher levels of customer satisfaction over the period.

As a customer you get to know your upgrade costs in advance, and don’t suddenly have to ‘find’ money you didn’t know you needed for an upgrade. Manufacturers get more revenue to fund further research ….so all well and good all round.

There’s a seemingly small issue though, one that can bite you

• The customer only wants to start their support contract from the completion of install, which can be months after original kit order
• The manufacturers start the 12 month clock when they ship

Renewals are sent from the kit manufacturer three months before you’re likely to see the revenue from your customer - and paying out months before you even know if you’re going to get your contract renewed isn’t much fun. 

This is compounded when lots of suppliers on the same install are going live at different times.

So, if your suppliers aren’t flexible about go live days for your orders - as opposed to ship dates - there will be trouble about 9 months later. Sounds about right when dealing with some manufacturers.

Our company supplies workflow solutions, so we can manage the lead times for solving the issues (saving a personal headache). But I bet there will be more than a fair few accounts in the industry on stop this time next year.

Something is wrong with Presence.

I harp on about this technology, and I keep looking around to see whether I can be proved wrong.

So, I was grateful to Mike Gotta (again) for pointing to this audio interview (48MB, 50 Min) with one of the founding fathers of Presence, Peter St-Andre with Lee Dryburgh, who happens to be organising a Unified Communications event in the spring, Ecomm2008

I do like being proved wrong, although friends and family may disagree, but my problem with Presence is still that it doesn’t seem scalable beyond immediate and close relationships.

Although very entertaining, and well worth the (your) time, I’m not sure the interview answered all my questions.

Ok, here’s the beef.

The more people I know, the more likely I am to be interrupted at someone elses convenience. 

On the basis that I don’t want to micro-manage my availability between constantly changing relationships with all the people I know, I just can’t make it work.

I initially equated Presence with ‘Busy Lamp Field’.

This was a quaint term used to describe the lights on a key telephone system handset, that lit when someone lifted their phone handset. As an early key system evangelist I thought this ‘Presence’ was going to be great.

Of course, the supposition turned out to be wrong. Despite people desperately wanting it to work (including me). Busy Lamp Fields are possibly why ‘phone’ people are very keen on this tech, but BLF and IM are not the same!

Whilst a ‘lit lamp’ told someone I was on the phone, and helped them know ‘not to try calling me’ (note, try) - when the lamp wasn’t lit, it DID NOT mean I was definitely at my desk and available to talk.

Whereas, the blinking IM message says that until you reply, you’re being ignorant. The refusal to communicate is in broad daylight.

Thus, there is an emotional blackmail being set, and to my mind that is exactly why people don’t buy into it.

It almost pains me to say it, but telephone presence is more useful to the recipient than desk based presence, in that there is no obligation to interact.

Another problem exists and it is this.

As a real time communication, there are also less facilities than asynchronous communication. This question of synchronous vs asynchronous came up in the podcast also, but indirectly.

So, the time to compose a considered and consultative response just isn’t there in real time conversation.

You can’t forward an IM for consideration by someone to contribute (with any certainty someone is going to be there right now!)

And, unlike other web based communication, the conversation isn’t discoverable (indexed) and won’t contribute to the knowledge base of the rest of the community. 

I find it interesting that the chap who first got me thinking on the Presence subject, Alec Saunders, has his company, Iotum, pioneering another communications medium - the multiparty conference call. 

Interesting because the conference call, whosoever has one, is booked in advance, and has a subject. It is a viable alternative to Presence . The permission factor is key for me. I’m not yet sure whether this has a significance on Alec’s thoughts on his New Presence…dot dot dot.

So, let’s have an invite…and acceptance….to talk about a subject….at a particular time, or joint circumstance.

If we have agreed to talk on a subject, and we’ve both concurrently indicated we’re in free mode, THEN let the availability be shown. It’s better than trying to reclassify everyone I know.

In my view, Presence missed a step, the equivalent of the ringing phone invitation.

So many fads, so little time

There used to be this thing called facebook, back in the day.

It was useful, in as much as it showed what was possible, but it left people clamouring for more.

More control, more interaction, more privacy.

I often think about the development of technology -for example  where wizards stay up late  was an enjoyable read for me (the birth of the internet).

So, when Chris of Particls - an interesting product by the way - asks people to think about what they’re in favour of, rather than what they’re against, then that’s just like I heard a starter’s pistol.

Ok, so here’s my go at the next way of interacting with my Network - I think this application should be called Conversationware (why not).

It should include;

A. Contact management - CRM but something that lives and breathes

B. Conversation management

b1. Invite function - ie. “I would like a conversation ‘about’ ” - this would be in some sort blend of wiki/blog mechanism,

b2. The invitee can accept, or not

b3. Priority can be set by the inviter, and invitee….separately

b4. Presence should be conditional upon acceptance, priority and current condition/mode

b5. If accepted, Priority should include, important and urgent, important not urgent, not important urgent, not important not urgent.

C. Condition/Mode setting - automatically updating the resulting ‘availability’, according to priorities in my network contacts client software - via machine based RSS or some such. Let me explain. If another conversation participant is available at high priority, I should have that conversation before ‘becoming available’ for a low priority conversation. Ideal worlds I know…but hey, this is my dream, and I dream of productivity.

D. Feed management and attention settings

E. Tagging

F. A remarkable interface for continuing and extending the conversation (for conversation read ‘task, project, etc etc’) - this should be very very open for additions or change, like mind manager software, but updated in each participants client. Click, type, press enter, update every participants client as soon as online……not client server, machine RSS….it has to cross boundaries and firewalls.

G. Conversations will be contextual and relative. Six people will be contributing to a customer generated conversation, but only the lead will be interacting directly with the customer on the issue.

G. Conversation exposure settings - internal and or external, public or partner,  - who can search in other words, and what search engines are given access. What conversations are listed for public access/contribution - you saw Parlano before Microsoft bought them?

H. Unified Communications. That way, the agenda comes first, and then the conversation, spoken or electronic follows. All potential conversations are therefore listed as you interact, and thus, all audit trails, including call recordings,  are automatically indexed.

There’s loads more, but I’ve run out of steam.

The future is more electronic, not less and we need more tools. Tools to speed up the contact are not enough on their own. We need this stuff to get things done.

Make it viral people. Microsoft DOS software was effectively free until they sorted the licencing later on, by which time they had a user base.

I’ll await my free trial….thanks.

I’ve noticed that a number of people searching for “CallPilot Exchange 2007″ are coming to this blogsite.

Because I posted asking where Callpilot is going, about 10 months ago, I’m seemingly getting a few hits through lack of news elsewhere.

Going back to Google just now, I just searched on - “Callpilot news”

In terms of Search Results - I often figure that the more recent the information, the more relevant. (Age affects relevancy, but only in terms of search of course

The fourth entry looked somewhat relevant, but goes back to 2001 - 6 years!

So….not a lot of news then. Conspicuous by it’s absence.

Of course, if you’re searching for Exchange 2007, you should know that Callpilot never ‘unified’ with Exchange in the first place. So there should be no real effect of a later version (guessing).

Callpilot stores messages on the voicemail server and should therefore really be described as ‘Integrated’ with Outlook. It works because Email clients like Outlook can look in multiple places for messages….and that’s why Outlook Web Access won’t show you voicemail in this sort of set up.

In my book at least, that was another terminology balls up by the industry at large, but that’s not the focus here.

If you’re searching to compare Nortel UM with Microsoft UM - although there may be licencing reasons to consider change - spare a thought for the users having to retrain! 

Seriously though, the whole Callpilot issue is still very cloudy with the Micosoft Exchange 2007 UM release and no news of a Callpilot development path (that’s available to me).

Callpilot runs on Windows 2003, when the new Nortel comms servers run on Linux. Thinking on, perhaps that’s why MS see the Comms market as lucrative….it’s an OS thing.

- and moreover with the new Microsoft Office Communications Server being effectively a switch with a proprietary IP protocol meaning specific handsets, and so how is that sitting with the partners in the Innovative Communications Alliance?

I believe the original plan was for OCS to be a CSTA overlay to existing telephony, but that’s not what I’ve read now.

If its confusing for me, it must be for everyone else, especially existing customers - unless someone can steer me in the right direction?

Maybe my research skills are deserting me, or perhaps bad news isn’t any better than no news?

High Availability and Disaster Recovery are different you know.

And I found out recently that there is also a third term - Continuous Availability.

Or at least, I now understand better what it means.

The ability to fail over an application server to a backup, so seamlessly that users don’t notice, between servers on different sites is pretty amazing. And, if you have over 99.3% uptime, you can claim Continuous Availability (Gartner’s term), as well as the other two.

It’s important I know this, because Avanquest now have distribution of Neverfail (such a brave name) - which provides Continuous Availability for the following

• Exchange
• Lotus Notes
• SQL
• File Server
• IIS
• Blackberry BES
• Rightfax

It can also run on VM Ware, leading to some very nice supplementary capabilities.

An excellent independent endorsement is here at it-director.com, a review

This is a Massive subject, even worthy of a capital ‘M’, and extremely topical with all my VOIP friends.

A few even go as far to say that failover is the only reason that their voip systems are selling so well.

With more and more communications capability becoming software applications, delivering Continuous Availability without those massive SAN and clustering costs will give a Competitive Advantage.

Backup servers are useless without knowing what the application is doing.

We are now availing our channel partners with these capabilities, with all the normal value added services wrap around of course.

Here’s a Neverfail customer video illustrating the point

Sometimes, the internet throws things up that make you laugh, for all the wrong reasons.

Proudly displayed on this website - Microsoft and Avaya’s great big advertising links alongside a very thin (to be kind) article about the vulnerabilities of Unified Communications.

You couldn’t make it up could you?

In case it gets taken down soon (UPDATE, the Avaya advert got removed) - the text includes things like

“One cannot ignore the seriousness of attacks against unified communications systems. At best, such an attack might disable your company’s phones. At worst though, a unified communications-based attack could allow an attacker to steal or modify data, or eavesdrop on voice or video calls”

and

“Unfortunately, I would have to write a good-sized book in order to cover all of the known exploits and countermeasures related to unified communications systems”

and worst of all

“Conclusion

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to secure your unified messaging systems. Some vulnerabilities effect virtually all unified messaging systems, regardless of make or model, while other vulnerabilities are specific to certain brands. Until traditional firewalls and IDS systems evolve to the point that they can detect unified messaging based-attacks, your best defence is to monitor the various web sites that I have mentioned in this article, in order to arm yourself with the latest security information.”

This last one is the richest of them all. I have never come across a Unified Messaging vulnerability in my 13 years of supplying them. That’s either from AVST or the competition. It’s just ridiculous.

It’s nice to be safe, however, you don’t need VOIP to get Unified Communications. But, if you do go that route, it can all sit nicely behind your firewall without opening any extra ports whatsoever.

An excellent post, as usual, linked here from mike Gotta, on the his view of the likely progress of Microsoft OCS and the status of key components.

A balanced view which adds value to whatever else we’ve seen in the last week.

   It feels like the calm before the carnage.

This week, Microsoft aimed at the Enterprise market with OCS, and Microsoft Admins over the world pricked up their ears.

To be able to apply their hard earned Active Directory and networking skills to telephony, and not to mention finding a new use for all that spare rack space, it must have felt like heaven.

At the other end, the SMB’s also got something. For those who have never heard of Active Directory in other words, 3 Com announced it’s support for the open source Asterisk PBX. This aimed squarely at those interested in a good deal for their telephone plumbing. 

Open source lacks credibility? Well, here’s some  - and an excellent article from Dan York indicates some traction. Comparing Asterisk to the rise of Linux is probably spot on from what I’ve seen recently.

Trixbox had a stand at IP07 - (I thought it was VOIP for business show, my mistake), and it looked like theirs was one of the busiest stands. A cool colour scheme must be the reason.

Anyone who says Asterisk won’t be a player, well, that’s like saying no corporate would ever install linux based applications.

Back in May we saw $6.5B of linux server sales in a quarter. That’s only 7 or 8 years worth of activity, without credibility.

Genesys supporting Asterisk is somewhat of a suprise given who they’re owned by,  but hedging bets was never a bad thing. 

So - two potentially massively impactful solutions gain traction on a crowded staid technology market. The neighbourhood just isn’t the same any more - that banging sound must be the ‘for sale’ signs going up.

This linked article at eweek about Microsoft UC wasn’t astounding in any way apart from the claim that

“In fact, Microsoft has replaced its old voice mail system with Exchange Server 2007 unified messaging, a move that is saving the company $5 million a year through lowered hardware and maintenance costs, he said.”

Bill Gates talking, apparently.

I understand that Microsoft doesn’t have to pay 29% for it’s own software renewal scheme, and therefore probably isn’t inidicative of the available savings for everyone else, but even so. $5 million saving in costs. For voicemail.

A few questions spring to mind

How many people does Microsoft have? 

Are there any employees left in America for any other companies?

Did the diamond embedded voicemail company ever need to sell any other systems?

With that account lost, does the salesman now have to come back out of retirement, and can he show his face after that last lease agreement?

And, do journalists ever ask for details to back up major sponsor’s claims, and is it necessary?

When we speak, in business, we are (usually) looking to achieve something.

UC technology helps us achieve more stuff, allowing us to speak to each other when we’re not in the same room, and by giving us extra tools like email attachments and multiperson multimedia conferencing to speed up the process.

When we communicate, if we can’t instantly move things on to completion, then we’re entering into an ongoing conversation…..and that could span days, months and even years.

These days, we have more of them, and they include more people

The thing is, in itself, UC doesn’t help all that much with the better organising of our multiplying conversations (meaning activities in common) - it more often means we just have more and richer ways of having them.

Even with all the tools being easier to use, you realise that the conversations still have to happen, and that there is loads still to do. You often can’t do more than one thing at once (fellas), so we have to get smarter, or at least incorporate tools that make us look that way.

For instance, Google desktop search makes me look good, for free, so thanks goes to them.

Similarly, being able to see at a glance which conversations have moved on whilst you were busy, or absent, and more usefully, being able to dip into colleagues’ previous conversations, is the promise of Parlano - which is soon to be incorporated into the Microsoft promise too blog by Nick Fera, the boss. Congratulations to them . I’m looking forward to seeing that as part of OCS.