Welcome to The Modality Systems Blog

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