Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications

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.

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.

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