Evangelyze Communications

OCS 2007 R2 Adds Ability to Display Caller Name

On our home phones and mobile phones we more or less take it for granted that the Caller ID will display the name of the person or organization calling in addition to the originating phone number. In fact, many people simply refuse to answer calls from “Unknown Caller” and let them go to voicemail by default. With Microsoft Unified Communications and Office Communications Server 2007 this has not been the case.

Thankfully, amid a slew of other recent updates, Microsoft also corrected this glaring error in call management. Mike Stacy, a Director with Evangelyze Communications, illustrates the difference with before and after screen shots in his blog entry on this subject. Stacy also points out some additional steps necessary to ensure the updates work with Office Communicator, and to configure Office Communications Server 2007 to also display caller information on outbound calls.

Microsoft Pulls the Plug on Response Point

A couple of years ago Microsoft created an innovative team with the goal of thinking outside of the normal corporate bureaucracy of Microsoft and coming up with a communications system for SMB’s (small and medium businesses). The result was the Response Point system.

Response Point was a powerful tool, offering SMB’s enterprise-class communications features at a cost-effective price that wouldn’t break an SMB budget. Unfortunately for Response Point they were also aggressivley developing Office Communications Server 2007 and their Unified Communications platform and the two are not compatible with each other. That lack of integration or upgrade path from one to the other is a significant part of why Microsoft has decided to kill Response Point.

SMB’s still need communications though. Joe Schurman, CEO of Evangelyze Communications and author of Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications, wrote a blog post with a sort of post mortem assessment of Response Point and some advice for Microsoft on how to proceed to capture that same SMB market and get them migrated to OCS 2007 and Microsoft UC.

Helping Customers Define Business Value

Microsoft has developed a tool, actually a collection of files including a customer questionnaire, the Excel-based Business Value Tool itself, and other supporting documentation, to help UC and voice partners explore and accelerate customer opportunities. It can be used to identify business objectives, demonstrate how unified communications can help the customer reach business objectives, and assess the financial impact of deploying Microsoft unified communications solutions. 

The Microsoft Unified Communications Business Value Tool is available on the Microsoft Partner Network site. Joe Schurman, CEO of Evangelyze Communications and author of Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications, has put together an extensive online video walking through the Business Value Tool in step-by-step detail.

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?

Evangelyze Communications Revolutionizes UC with SmartSIP

SmartSIP is officially here! In the official press release Simon Booth, Director of Research & Development for Evangelyze Communications, says “SmartSIP is designed for extending the Microsoft UC platform to industry standard SIP connectivity (UDP) while minimizing the maintenance and administration overhead by leveraging Microsoft’s Active Directory and OCS configuration.”

Check out this video overview of SmartSIP to learn why this product is so revolutionary, then visit the Evangelyze Communications site to get more details and figure out how to use SmartSIP to change communications in your organization.

SmartSIP - So Simple a Kid Can Understand It

One of  the most anticipated innovations in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 was the introduction of the ability to connect OCS directly to a SIP trunk. One caveat to that excitement was that Microsoft only provides that connectivity with two chosen SIP trunk providers. That seriously limits the potential of direct SIP trunking.

Evangelyze Communications is coming to the rescue though with SmartSIP. SmartSIP enables organizations to connect OCS with….wait. I can’t possibly explain SmartSIP any better than this video overview. The clip is less than a minute long and well worth the time. Check it out for yourself.

Microsoft Unified Communications Virtual User Group

What exemplifies the spirit of unified communications more than a virtual user group?

The Microsoft Unified Communications Virtual User Group (UCVUG) has been established with the stated purpose ”to provide resources, education, and collaboration to professionals who are interested in Microsoft Unified Communications products.”

The group, which is not officially sanctioned by Microsoft, will meet on a quarterly basis online via Microsoft virtual meeting tools such as Live Meeting. Membership is free and you can join by filling out a simple registration form.  

The group’s first meeting is scheduled for May 21st at 7pm Eastern time and will feature a presentation from Evangelyze Communications’ Mike Stacy. Stacy will discuss Evangelyze Communications innovative SmartSIP product that extends Microsoft OCS connectivity to virtually any SIP trunk provider and any SIP phone / device.

A Recipe for Success

Remember when Cisco was a network hardware company? Cisco and networking were virtually synonymous and you knew who to call if you needed a router or a switch. Once upon a time, Avaya was a provider of enterprise communications equipment. If you needed phones or maybe an IP PBX, you could call Avaya. In days gone by Microsoft focused on server and desktop operating systems and developing software applications to help businesses be more productive. Ah, the good ole days.

To be fair, each of those companies still does what it used to. But, now the waters are muddy as they all try to be all things to all customers. As Joe Schurman, CEO of Evangelyze Communications and author of Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications, points out in his musings from Voicecon 2009, nobody was content with their piece of the pie and now they all want to be the whole pie.

The thing is, none of them really have ALL of the ingredients necessary to make the best pie. If I could only buy a pie from one company I would get my pie from Microsoft because they have the most complete list of ingredients. I might need to top it off with some additional ingredients like SmartSIP, but the Microsoft Unified Communications platform offers the most comprehensive and innovative features in the most cost effective and flexible solution of the major players.

That said, these vendors and the customers both benefit when they stop competing to be the whole pie and instead focus on how to integrate their ingredients to cooperate to make the best pie possible. A Microsoft Unified Communications platform using Avaya or Nortel communications equipment connected to a Cisco network infrastructure seems like a recipe for success.

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SmartSIP Provides Exciting Possibilities for OCS 2007 R2

When Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS 2007 R2) was unveiled in February of this year, it signaled the beginning of the end for the PBX or IP PBX. That is just my opinion I suppose, but it at least signaled proverbial dropping of the gloves as Microsoft moves forward with plans to make the PBX obsolete.

One of the features of OCS 2007 R2 which signal the first step toward killing off the PBX is the ability to do direct SIP trunking- connecting a VoIP provider directly to OCS 2007 R2 without the need for a PBX appliance between them. This is good news, but not great news. The reason it is not great news is that Microsoft only has partnerships with two VoIP providers, severely limiting the potential of the direct SIP trunking feature.

That is where SmartSIP comes in. Evangelyze Communications,  a global voice and unified communications products and professional services organization that specializes in Microsoft Unified Communications IP telephony products and services, has developed a suite of custom tools that extend the functionality of Microsoft OCS and open new possibilities for unified communications. One of those tools is SmartSIP.

According to a recent blog post from Mike Stacy, Director of Services for Evangelyze Communications, SmartSIP “will allow you to connect OCS with virtually any SIP system – TCP or UDP.  The most common use is to connect a Mediation server to a customer’s existing ITSP, but it can also connect to other IP gateways, SBCs, IP PBXs, etc.”

The product is still in Beta now with the first release scheduled for April. Stacy’s blog post thought talks about the excitement that SmartSIP is generating in the field, and some of the innovative solutions that are possible with SmartSIP like the ability to provide failover redundancy for the VoIP connection, or saving a 350-user company over $90,000 on their unified communications implementation.

Check out Mike Stacy’s blog for more details, and check out the Evangelyze Communications site for more about SmartSIP and the other tools available such as SmartChat and SmartVoIP.

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Making a Case for VoIP

As a consumer I have used VoIP for almost 5 years. I have been with Vonage in three different houses in two different states separated by 1300 plus miles. While I didn’t take advantage of it when moving from Michigan to Texas (seemed like people might get confused by a ‘248′ area code in Houston), the fact is that I could have kept my phone number. The Internet is the Internet. As long as I have a broadband connection Vonage can route my call to me whether I am in Michigan, Texas, or New Zealand.

Cost is another factor. I was paying my local phone company for basic service, then paying additional money for long distance service (plus the per-minute calling charges), and adding nickel-and-dime costs for features like voicemail or caller ID. With VoIP I got everything for one flat fee. Again, with the Internet being  the Internet, it really doesn’t matter if I call my next door neighbor or a long-lost relative in Zurich. There isn’t any local and long distance. Some consumer VoIP providers haven’t gotten that memo though. My cable company offers ‘digital voice’ and charges per minute for long distance. No, thank you.

As it turns out, cost savings and number portability are also two of many compelling reasons for using VoIP for business telephony. The ability to develop custom tools and expand the functionality of voice communications to meet business needs is another great reason. Microsoft has made it exceptionally easy by letting organizations start with what they have and leverage their existing investment rather than replacing everything. Why isn’t every business moving to VoIP already?

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