Communications unleashed from Microsoft

How people communicate nowadays has been dramatically changed over the past decade. Innovation in communications technology has created numerous devices and methods of communication, yet people say they find it increasingly difficult to use and achieve the target; reaching people in the appropriate form.
Microsoft believes that unified communications – including voice over IP (VoIP) – can resolve the problem and is developing solutions that will make it easy for people to communicate simply and efficiently through any device and from anywhere.

Microsoft unified communications vision aimed to use the power of software to deliver complete communications – messaging, voice, and video – across the applications and devices that people use every day.

We believe unified communications will transform business in the coming decade in the same way e-mail changed the business landscape in the 1990s.
The communications world is split in two – between the things you do on the telephone and the things you do on the computer. The split creates problems, lots of them. Phones aren't as intuitive as they should be: just try to start a three-way call without hanging up on someone. Computers can check your e-mail, but not your voice mail. And then there's the enormous cost of purchasing, maintaining, and upgrading two complex infrastructures.

To get your phones and your computers talking, you'd have to tear out your entire telephone system, dump your PBX, replace every desk phone, and swap out every phone jack. In short, you'd have to start from scratch.
When phone services become software, are managed by a server, and are delivered to desktop applications, many interesting things happen.

Streamlined communications for businesses
Microsoft unified communications technologies help businesses in streamline communications through the integration of written forms of communications such as email, fax and instant messaging (IM) with the voice-based communications such as voice call, voice message, telephone conference along with visual means of communications such as video conferencing. Such integration allows people to find it much easier to get all incoming communication messages through one application without the need to navigate from one system to another. For example, if someone sent you an email and gave you a call with a voice mail and faxed you 2 pages around the same subject, you can get all these scattered pieces in one location which is your email inbox. By doing even further more integration, the missed call that has reached you has an option to call back the caller through the same application.

One of the biggest challenges of today’s communications is how to reach the right person at the right time using the right tool. For example, if you want to talk to a colleague in the company you might call him on his desk phone and no answer, you might call him on mobile and it’s turned off and finally after some time you send him an email and find that the person is on vacation and will come after two days. Such trials is usually frustrating waste of employees time, waste of organizations assets for phone calls and finally the task is not finished yet; you didn’t reach your colleague.

However, taking the same scenario with Microsoft unified communications; you can search for the colleague name in Office Communicator to see his presence, he is offline and read his out of office note before even start your first call. This is the true value of integrating people presence with the communications tools.
The example above shows how the different means of communications can integrated together to let people become more productive in the way they receive and consolidate different communication messages arriving to different systems.

It works, anywhere, any device
The end user experience is always number one in the priority list of Microsoft. This has been seen always in all their products and how easy-to-use it is. Same thing applies here to Unified Communications. Users of the solution can leverage the technology from their offices at companies, from their homes with internet connection, or even from a coffee shop with wireless connection to the internet. The same set of features including ability to see people presence, call them on their phones, and accept incoming phone calls to desk phones will work from anywhere.

There is no need to do heavy bandwidth connection to their corporate network to use these features. Moreover, uses of the technology can enjoy using the mobile phone client that allows them to connect over any data connection (GRPS, 3G, etc.) to utilize the solution. For scenarios like having web-conference with partners, vendors or customers, the solution offers interaction with anonymous parties to join the corporate users in their web-conferences where they can share data, video and voice and even record and archive the content for later viewing.

What about security
Security has been a concern for all enterprises at all levels and it remains a concern when talking about software-based communications.
The solution offered from Microsoft provides people identity guaranteed by the corporate services so people would know exactly who is sending them instant message and who have placed a phone call to their desk. On the other hand, all written communications including email, instant messages and faxes are encrypted before it goes to the wire to ensure safety and confidentiality of business information being exchanged between people.

The verbal and visual communications are even more important as it is usually contains more sensitive information that could lead to security and information leaks. Microsoft solution is protecting these types of communication to ensure the same safety level for this information being passed through a telephone call or videoconference as well.
With that much innovations in communications technology, a big question appears about compliance with regulations and policies.

Nowadays, every company is watching and reviewing carefully their policies and regulations to adopt with the local and international laws. Some organizations adopted certain standards for their formal business communications internally and with other organizations externally. This is applied also to software-based communications; for example, if a person started a call with call center agent, we usually hear the term “this call will might be recorded…”

Applying the same concept to software-based communications makes it a requirement to have this type of communication software compliant with regulations and policies. Part of Microsoft unified communications offering is the ability to comply with regulations by using features such as archiving of conversations, call details logs, recording of web conferences and user-based policies make the solution more adoptive. For example, with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, organizations can start enforcing rules on telephone usage including disabling dialing certain numbers, and disallowing people of communicating with certain group.

Another typical example is where you want to monitor people usage by getting reports on how many conference a person had started in the company and what was the average number of attendees per conference. Going even further by monitoring and auditing people usage to features like instant messaging and block certain words from being sent or even certain file types from being transferred to protect users against viruses and Spam Instant Messages (SPIM) while complying with company policies.

It is a future-ready foundation
Now think about how frequently you change your mobile phone versus changing your desk phone at the office, you will find that companies usually take very slowly but surely steps toward changing their telephony systems. Therefore, moving to Voice-over-IP (VoIP), IP-Telephony and some other terms is a very strategic decision for all organizations at all levels. This is why Microsoft positioned the “VoIP as you are” strategy. In simple terms, the Microsoft solution doesn’t require organizations to rip and replace their PBX to deploy and leverage VoIP and enable their employees to use IP-Telephony.

For organizations who have traditional PBX whether analog or digital, the solution works and gives the same user experience for integrating the phone capabilities with the software on their desktop. Even better, it makes the telephony system components transparent for users. Companies can select and chose between multiple vendors of PBX without affecting the user experience. At some situations, the entire PBX functionality can be completely achieved using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

As mentioned earlier, when phone capabilities brought to desktop applications many interesting things can happen. This is demonstrated clearly when we look deeper into the capabilities of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and discover its ability to extend the phone features to other applications. For example, when an organization deploys Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, their employees can open Microsoft Office applications, such as Word and Excel, and type another employee name where they will see his presence (online, offline, busy) information immediately.

Moreover, from within the same office application, they can chose to start calling that person with one click. Similar to the same functionality, other software integrators and application vendors can leverage the phone capabilities by integrating with Office Communications Server 2007 and enable their applications to call a person, show people presence, making a conference call, etc. The decision that Microsoft has taken is to make this technology available to other technology solution partners to integrate and capitalize on the functionalities. This is illustrated by the example of having this technology available as a mobile application that run on your mobile phone. Microsoft has adopted this application for Windows-based mobiles, but other vendors like Research In Motion (RIM), the BlackBerry company, is the one that develop the mobile application on their device to work with Communications Server.

Market position and momentum
As the market seen already big names for the Unified Communications technologies and solutions, it was very crucial to Microsoft to do it right first time. So when Microsoft entered the VoIP market for the first time, the analysts appreciated the vision and functionality by putting Microsoft in the best magic quadrant from a vision/ability to execute measures. Moreover, when Microsoft announced the vision and technology behind Unified Communications, Intel Corporation, Texas Instruments Inc., AudioCodes Ltd., Dialogic Corp., LG-Nortel Co.

Ltd. and Polycom Inc. announced that they will license Microsoft’s voice codec software; called RT Audio Codec. According to Psytechnics Ltd., a company specialized in voice and video quality monitoring; this codec has been shown to deliver superior sound quality.

From a customer perspective, Microsoft has more than 200 case studies on its web site for customers deployed already the Unified Communications solution at their production environment. This is just an example of how the market received Microsoft entering the Unified Communication arena as a true big player.

Increase efficiency and reduce cost
Large companies with numerous locations and many staff will benefit from unified communications. People spend a lot of time looking for phone numbers and other contact details, leaving voice mails and waiting for replies. This can be a waste of time. Reducing voicemail improves productivity and helps people to work more efficiently.

Some companies will achieve cost benefits as many business calls end at a mobile phone or external phone. Those calls carry a cost, but they can be reduced by using unified communications. A significant cost reduction can also be gained by switching from desk phones, which are expensive to buy and administer, to PC soft phones.

At the moment, we are seeing greater adoption of unified communications among large companies in EMEA as implementation requires some in-house IT and communications expertise.

When you deploy Microsoft unified communications technologies, you make the most of your existing communications investments because Microsoft's solution integrates seamlessly with your existing IT infrastructure and your telephone systems, including legacy PBXs. Plus, Microsoft unified communications technologies bring new tools like click-to-call, and audio- and videoconferencing to the Microsoft Office system applications