May, 2009

Google Ripples Market With Announcement of Wave

At the Google I/O conference Google unveiled a revolutionary new collection of communication and collaboration tools dubbed “Wave”. Wave seems to be a very ambitious project from Google which potentially impacts both the unified communications and collaboration players including Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, IBM, and others, but also provides some potential competition for Microsoft Office as well.

Wave, as it was demoed at Google I/O, is still in the early stages of development. You can watch the demo from Google I/O. It is an hour and twenty minutes long though so clear your calendar and get a pot of coffee going. Techcrunch provides a detailed look at and review of Google Wave.

What do you think? Does Google Wave have what it takes to upset the unified communications industry? What about Microsoft Office Wave 14? Did Google tip their hand early enough for Microsoft developers to jump on some of the Wave innovations and try to incorporate them before the next version of Office is released?

Saving Money By Investing in Unified Communications

When is an expense not an expense? When the expense saves more money than it costs. There is a reason that so many organizations are continuing to invest in unified communications deployments. They are laying off workers, freezing pay, and cutting budgets in other areas in response to the recession / depression and general state of the global economy.

But, investing in unified communications is seen as a cost-cutting measure as well as an investment in technologies that will help the organization to communicate more effectively and operate more efficiently so it can continue to get more done with fewer resources. In a time when people and budgets are being cut, unified communications almost becomes an imperative so that the people who are remain can still get the job done and deliver quality products and services for customers.

That is just my $.02 (which may only be worth half a cent in this economy- so take it for what its worth). You can get another point of view on the subject from this CIO.com article: Unified Communications, Collaboration Can Help Save Cash.

Unified Communications & Social Networking

Many of the components included in unified communications started off or at least became mainstream in the consumer market. Instant messaging, web-based email, wikis, etc.. These technologies seem to catch fire as a grassroots movement from end-users jumping on the latest cutting edge technologies often before they even understand what the point of them is. Eventually, they become more mainstream and enterprises find ways to leverage or exploit them as well and they become integrated into the corporate network.

Unified communications is an established market, but also a young and evolving market at the same time. Web 2.0 and social networking continue to evolve almost exponentially as well. Where the two meet they can either assimilate and become one, or battle to the death for dominance. Read this article to learn more about a panel discussion at Interop 2009 focused on the future of unified communications and social networking convergence.

Microsoft and HP Form Unified Communications Alliance

Microsoft has established itself as a leader in the unified communications market, but their focus on the software side of things means that they don’t have an end-to-end solution. The up side for customers is that Microsoft does not lock you into using specific or proprietary hardware. That is what allows Microsoft to run marketing campaigns like “VoIP As You Are”.

The down side is that Microsoft does not provide the desk phones and other related hardware so they have to make sure they are forging alliances with companies that do to ensure that there are quality hardware products that are designed for and certified compatible with Microsoft Office Communications Server and the Microsoft Unified Communications platform.

According to this article from InformationWeek, Microsoft and HP announced a partnership to merge their resources in an effort to build an end-to-end unified communications solution and continue to battle Cisco and IBM for UC market share.

Five DRBC Tips For Coping with a Pandemic

I know I am beating a dead horse. I have two points though in my defense..no wait- three points.

1. H1N1 / swine flu did not go away. It is not daily headline news anymore, but it is still out there and still spreading. As of this week there are almost 9,000 cases and 15 deaths just in the United States.
2. Even if H1N1 / swine flu is not *the* virus that will truly become the next pandemic, history and probability suggest that one will eventually come along.
3. The last- and arguably best- point is that these tips just make sense. Whether it is due to an epedemic or pandemic, or a natural disaster, or any other reason, these tips will help your organization be prepared to continue business as usual…or at least close enough to usual that business will still get done.

Check out Five DR Tips to Cope with a Pandemic for some tips you can put to use and put in place now so that you are prepared when a disaster strikes.

Surviving the Recession: Top 5 Ways UC Can Help

Shrinking or stagnant budgets are keeping many companies from taking the leap and investing in a full-fledge UC implementation. Do your part to ensure you’re spending the smartest IT dollars you can by attending this Virtual Seminar, “Unified Communications: A Good Investment in a Down Economy” to find out why right now is the best time to invest in UC - without having to take time out of the office.

Greater productivity, decreased costs and rapid ROI top the list of the promises of unified communications. However, as budgets shrink, companies are finding it harder to justify the costs. In this Virtual Seminar, you’ll learn why a smart investment in UC now can immediately save your company money and give you the competitive edge you’ve been looking for.

Pre-register today:

http://go.techtarget.com/r/7261504/5421719

Modern Hieroglyphs

All text are images to some degree. You are able to make sense of what I am typing because you have been trained to decipher groups of images pulled from the 26 available in the English alphabet and combined to form words. Civilizations like the ancient Egyptians though used images that were more literally ‘pictures’ of what they intended to convey.

Those images are called hieroglyphs. In a recent post on his blog Joe Schurman, Founder and CEO of Evangelyze Communications and author of Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications, ponders whether future civilizations will look back on our time and consider emoticons to be the hieroglyps of our age. Interesting concept to ponder. Would you say that emoticons are an evolution of our ability to communicate efficiently, or a regression in our ability to communicate by using a questionably literate form of shorthand?

Gone Vishing

No. Its not a typo. Vishing is a new twist on phishing scams using voice, typically VoIP. There have been two prevalent vishing scams recently: one selling extended automobile warranties and one offering to reduce your interest rate on your credit cards. You may have received such calls on your home or mobile phone. Don’t bother trying to use the number on your caller ID to contact them or file a complaint though- its spoofed. The FCC has filed lawsuits against the telemarketing firms behind these scams. For more about these scams and the details on vishing in general read Protecting Yourself From Vishing Attacks.

Social Networking on Company Time

Employees are only human. They take breaks. They get distracted. As companies demand more from fewer employees and blur the line between ‘work’ time and ‘personal’ time, it is to be expected that personal or non-business use of computer and network resources will occur. But, how much is too much?

A recent study by Facetime found that actual usage is about 10 times higher than what managers estimated employees were doing. Employees are using MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and many other social networking and Web 2.0 resources. This activity may exceed a reasonable amount of ‘personal’ time for some employees and it also has security implications for the enterprise. Check out this ITWeb article for a more detailed breakdown of what Facetime found in the study.

Using Virtual Meetings to Fight Recessions and Pandemics

Companies love to have meetings. In my experience, the bigger the company, the more they like to meet. While working for a Fortune 100 IT services company I once had more than 20 hours of my work week filled with recurring meetings. In other words, more than half of my available time each week was spent meeting about what to do instead of going and doing it.

One of the reasons companies like meetings is that there is an assumption that there is some greater camaraderie or synergy developed from the face to face interaction. Do you know what else is greater in a face to face interaction? Germs. Meetings are typically in enclosed spaces and involve handshaking, sharing documents, and other physical interactions that can result in spreading germs.

Some meetings are just local team meetings, but often customers, vendors, partners, or managers fly in from across the country or around the world to participate in meetings. Those trips incur travel costs, lodging, meals, rental cars, etc. Hopefully some Earth-shattering information is covered at the meeting to justify the costs.

In this time of economic recession and with the emerging threat of the potential pandemic of H1N1 (swine flu), organizations should re-examine the value provided by these face to face meetings. The fact is, the same meeting can be conducted and the same results achieved without the travel or germs. Joe Schurman agrees with this mentality in his recent post Swine Flu + Recession = Microsoft Office Live Meeting.