Joe Schurman

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?

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.

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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Business-focused Communications Solutions

In a recent ITWorld.com article, Joe Schurman, Founder and CEO of Evangelyze Communications and author of Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications, is quoted as saying “What I like best about Microsoft voice and unified communications is that it includes the ability for developers to build customized, business-focused communications solutions, not just provide a telephony platform. No other voice and UC vendor can compete with this strategy.”

The article, titled Building Business-Focused Communications Solutions, goes on to talk about Schurman’s five must-do tips to get the most out of Microsoft voice and unified communications, as well as some advice on pitfalls to avoid.

Making Unified Communications Work For You

According to a recent study companies continue to adopt and invest in unified communications technologies despite the crippled economy. As this ITWorld.com article points out though, companies should also understand the potential of unified communications and design a unified communications system that works for them.

The article, written by Evangelyze Communications Founder and CEO, and author of Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications, Joe Schurman, points out that software-powered voice opens up a whole new world of opportunity. Rather than letting the traditional methods and uses of voice communications dictate business processes, companies can now create communications methods that enhance and expand upon their business processes. Unified Communications enables companies to create new innovative solutions.

Evangelyze Communications, Schurman’s company, has created a suite of products that customers can use to extend their communications capabilities and leverage the power of unified communications to improve business processes. Products like SmartChat, SmartVoIP, SmartSIP, and SmartConference demonstrate some of what is capable by extending the functionality of Microsoft Office Communications Server by developing custom applications. There are also opportunities to customize these applications for specific needs, or simply develop custom solutions specifically for unique customer needs.

The ITWorld.com article, Putting Unified Communications to Work, has some more general insight that companies can benefit from as well. Schurman offers up 4 tips for unified communications success, and the following 3 Classic Mistakes for companies to avoid:

• Not choosing a partner that understands how to build a solution around your unique business processes. There are a ton of Microsoft partners out there that are Gold Certified, but there are only a handful that know how to create this kind of unique voice and unified communications solution for your organization.
• Shelling out money too soon. Don’t pay yet! This is new technology, it has to be proven. Microsoft and key partners are offering free consultation and pilots so take advantage of it. If you like what you see, you can then budget a production deployment that will pay for itself within 6 months based on the amount of hard and soft cost savings.
• Not getting business people involved. Business managers need to be involved so that you can see a clear distinction between what is just technology and what is going to support your unique business process.

Book Review: Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications

Bottom Line:
Unified Communications is one of those hot, ‘buzzword’ technologies that everyone is talking about and many are adopting, or at least exploring. However, unified communications is also a somewhat ethereal concept with no agreed upon standard for what it actually is, and a playing field that is shifting faster than customers can understand. Unified communications is important and it will transform the way companies communicate and do business so managers need to grasp how to leverage the technologies. Joe Schurman’s book provides understanding that readers need regarding unified communications today, but more importantly it provides insight into the unified communications of tomorrow so that readers can develop strategies that are effective now as well as the near future.

My Review:
Joe Schurman is uniquely suited to write Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications. Schurman has been involved in voice and unified communications technologies virtually since their inception. He has been a successful consultant, speaker, and trainer, focusing on evangelizing Microsoft solutions, for the past 15 years. As the Founder and CEO of Evangelyze Communications, a Microsoft Gold Partner and Voice Premier Partner, Joe continues to be a respected authority in the field and a trusted confidant of Microsoft.

The book is not available today. According to Amazon.com readers can find the book around the end of February. I was fortunate to be able to read the pre-publications drafts and to provide my insight and feedback on the chapter dedicated to VoIP and unified communications security.

The book opens with an excellent overview of the history of telephony and the evolution through VoIP (voice over IP) to SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and other voice protocols, the concept of Presence, and the development of what unified communications is today. Schurman then goes on to talk about the use of VoIP by the consumer market using tools such as Windows Live Messenger, an excellent look at Microsoft’s Response Point phone system for SMB’s, and a discussion of enterprise-class solutions built on Microsoft Unified Communications technologies such as Office Communications Server and Exchange Server.

The book then covers additional topics like integrating collaboration and speech recognition into the unified communications / VoIP environment, and how to customize the solution to extend its capabilities. This is an area that Schurman has intimate knowledge of as his company, Evangelyze Communications, has leveraged the extensibility of Office Communications Server to develop innovative products like SmartChat, and the 2008 Internet Telephony Magazine Product of the Year, SmartVoIP.

Schurman covers more advanced topics like securing and virtualizing unified communications and voice, and a chapter for consultants to help them understand how to sell the unified communications concept to customers.

Unified communications is a quickly evolving technology (or collection of technologies) that businesses around the world are struggling to understand and embrace. Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications is just the title that these readers need to educate themselves on what unified communications can do for them today, but more importantly to position themselves for what unified communications will do for them tomorrow.

Features and Facts:
Title: Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications
Price: $39.99 (available from Amazon.com for $26.39)
Published: Feb 2009, Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 032157995X (ISBN-13: 978-0321579959)
Pages: 288

Driving Business Value With Unified Communications

There is an old saying in sales that customers ‘don’t buy the bacon, they buy the sizzle’. In other words, customers are less interested in the nitty gritty details of what a product is or how it works, and primarily interested in what it will do for them. It’s a sort of ’show me the money’ mentality.

Joe Schurman, Founder and CEO of Evangelyze Communications and author of Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications, talks about this philosophy as it related to unified communications in a recent ITWorld.com article. Schurman writes “The CEO of a company wants to know if he or she is saving money and will be impressed if the solution can integrate into the company’s business strategy…”

Read Driving Business Value with Unified Communications to learn more about the direction of unified communications and how to realize the value of increased efficiency and reduced operating costs rather than focusing on the technology itself.

Clarifying the UC Vision

Unified Communications is still in its infancy more or less. Vendors are still fighting to define what UC even is, and to declare their stake in the industry. Some vendors are traditional voice or network infrastructure hardware vendors that are trying to extend into software and application integration. Some vendors are software developers and application integrators who are working to develop or incorporate voice and network hardware. But, what *really* defines UC?

Joe Schurman, Founder and CEO of Evangelyze Communications and a respected VoIP and UC visionary, explores this question in a recent blog post. Actually, Schurman’s post starts off as more of a vent against what he perceives as current marketing and sales efforts missing the mark. Essentially, Schurman feels that vendors are too focused on feature comparisons and ’selling’ the underlying technology. Schurman says he believes that “…what will actually make a difference to people is how the technology can be integrated, how it can affect the business applications they use today…”

I agree with Joe. Enterprises like Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, IBM, and Microsoft should all know that one of the most fundamental rules of sales is that you “sell the ’sizzle’, not the bacon.” In other words, ultimately what matters is how the product or service will benefit the company. What value will that product or service provide the customer? There are those within an organization who may care what protocol is being used, or the operating system that the product runs on, or how the  technical architecture is put together behind the scenes. All of those things will need to be known and understood at some point, but they are not compelling reasons to buy or not to buy a given solution.

Joe sums it up in his blog post “The CEO of a company does not care about whether dual forking is obtained through two components or one.  The CEO of a company wants to know if he or she is saving cost and will be impressed if the solution can integrate into the company’s business strategy, the process, and the underlying applications that support this strategy that have been custom-built by an internal staff.” The bottom line is that an investment in UC helps an enterprise to operate more efficiently. Operating more efficiently translates to reduced travel and communications costs as well as enabling companies to trim costs in other business processes. Operating more efficiently means that the organization can innovate faster than competitors and respond quickly to changes in the market.