At Modality Systems, we like to experiment with technology. (Actually, that’s not exactly true – we like to abuse technology. You don’t get good orange juice by being nice to an orange.)
One of the things that’s captured our fascination recently is the utter elegance and simplicity of the software and hardware coming out of Cupertino. The "creative types" have known this secret for quite some time, but as a Enterprise-centric company, we’ve had our heads in the sand to some extent.
James decided to buy an iPhone recently and we’ve all be wowed by the web browsing experience. Outlook Web Access looks so good on this thing that he’s not entirely missing Active Sync yet. With ActiveSync on the roadmap for the iPhone, it begs the question: Will the iPhone become the de facto corporate communications device? It’s not unthinkable.
For us, the important question is how this will integrate with your Unified Communications infrastructure. There is no Communicator Mobile software for the iPhone, so the logical the logical question is how well web-based UC applications will work.
We started by running Communicator Web Access. After you manage to get pop-up blocking disabled, it runs really well in the iPhone’s Safari browser. The contact list doesn’t appear for some reason (though CWA works fine using Safari on a Mac or PC), but the search function works nicely and allows the user to look up a contact and send an IM.
We’ll continue to test the Microsoft UC stack on Apple products and report back our findings in a series of posts.
-John Lamb, Modality Systems
Two industry shows in the last 2 weeks, both asking the same question: “What is the killer application for Unified Communications?” Having attended both, it is fair to say that the question was not answered.
There has, however, been lot’s of attempts to re-brand a lot of legacy technologies as Unified Communications.
I’ve made two observations:
From one perspective, you can make the observation that “Presence” is the killer application for Unified Communications – Introducing pervasive presence information as a horizontal feature across a range of isolated applications provides immediate value; “Presence” becomes the enabler to improve technology disconnects and drive instant event-based communication.
The second observation is that trying to define a killer application for UC forms something of misleading question. The application is really just “communications”, and it’s not really even an application but a platform. It’s the unification of disconnected communications silos that is killer, much in the same way that the web provides a connected and contextual framework for vast amounts of data through hyperlinking.
The true value to your organisation comes from being able to build on and leverage this platform level presence into existing killer applications and business process. Just imagine what can be achieved by embedding contextual and relevant presence information into existing processes; and then further by extending this presence into key customers and partners.
Technorati Tags: unified communications
On Friday 27-March, The Daily Telegraph had a 7 page pull out section all about Unified Communications… but not as we know it.
It looks to be heavily influenced by Nortel, but has comment from Cisco, Siemens, Alcatel and more. I will leave you to read the full article if you wish, but the main thread is that all things PBX and the move towards Convergence is now called Unified Communications. The cover story is about Gloucester Rugby Club deploying UC – which when you read closely, it appears the solution is simply an Avaya IP Telephony (IPT) system – and no more. Not to dismiss the value of IPT and the great work of our friends who design and develop these systems, but a rose by any other name is still a rose.
Microsoft’s OCS and IBM’s Sametime software based solutions are only mentioned on page 7 under “Collaboration”. The article goes on to say: “Unified Comms really come into its own when IPT is combined with a Collaboration platform like Microsoft OCS or IBM Sametime.” That’s one way to say it. Another way to say this is “IPT is just another phone system until you integrate it with information systems and desktop applications.”
A week a later, I attended two industry events in London. The same theme of IPT as UC was pervasive.
There is a big effort from PBX vendors here to make sure UC is the new name for IPT.
