Paul's Down-Home Page

Jeff Raikes started off the presentation with a short “People-Ready” video and a discussion of some broad communications and collaboration challenges. There was a short man-on-the-street video interview montage, which wasn’t funny, followed by a demo of the new RoundTable conferencing camera featuring a meeting to discuss where a team should eat lunch. Realistic? No, but mildly amusing, and it showed off RoundTable well.

RoundTable (available “about a year from now”) is a hardware device: it’s a 360° camera that works with Live Meeting to give you panoramic video and automatic speaker detection: you see the face of whoever’s talking at the moment. If it’s well-executed, this could be very valuable for distributed teams.

Next, Raikes talked about SIP and how it’s the core protocol for Microsoft’s communications system. Office is positioned as a platform delivering services in key areas, including presence and mobility enablement. The New product announcements, all due in Q2 CY 2007:

• Office Communications Server 2007, which unifies SIP-based IM and self-hosted conferencing. This is a terrific answer to critics who have complained that Live Meeting is only available as a service. Lots of customers want hosted conferencing servers, but not everyone does.
• Office Communicator 2007, which now includes a SIP softphone so you can use the VoIP features of Communications Server and Communicator without any hardware.
• Office Live Meeting adds the capability to use both PSTN and IP audio, plus WMV and Flash embedding (the demo featured a Live Meeting session in which a video was played back– a nice, and useful, feature). Live Meeting includes presence status indicators, and it provides “talking head” video of the presenter.

Raikes was joined on-stage by Anoop Gupta of Microsoft’s unified communications group for a demo of the new suite of projects featuring a future clone of Raikes– this was a clever idea, and the “clone” actor pulled it off nicely. The demo showcased the high degree of integration between Communicator, Communications Server, and 2007 Office System applications. For example, when you start an IM session from within Outlook, the IM window reflects the subject of the e-mail message. The point behind this demo was to show how easy it is to move seamlessly between audio, text, and video conferencing (and application sharing) without switching applications or work contexts. There’s a small inset window for video conversations that shows what you look like, which is also useful. The 2007 products support multi-party, multi-point audio and video, something missing from the 2005 versions.

One part of the demo showed a voice-driven session with the Microsoft helpdesk, conducted through Communicator 2007: a manager called in and automatically provisioned a new user. The point of this demo is that Microsoft’s positioning of their communications product as a platform unlocks a wide range of potential business applications. SharePoint already puts a heavy emphasis on self-service provisioning, one of its most popular features; it’s good to see this possibility expanded to other areas.

There were a few surprises; for example, Live Meeting will integrate with the Exchange Hosted Services Archiving component to provide long-term archiving for meeting data. This is a very smart move, because compliance is one of the key drivers that make people want self-hosted conferencing services.)

Other nifty things they showed: Exchange 2007 Outlook Voice Access; getting an Exchange 2007 unified messaging voice mail on a Windows Mobile device and playing it back; SOTI PocketController for controlling a mobile device from the Windows desktop; Communicator Mobile running on the Motorola Q.

Microsoft also made partnering announcements with Hewlett Packard, Motorola, and Siemens. HP is committing to providing Communications Server services and installations, and Siemens is building solutions to help people move from their conventional PBX solutions to IP-based systems featuring Microsoft’s solutions. Motorola’s announcement involves roaming between cellular to VoIP calls, but it’s not clear to me what impact this has to actual users and administrators. With the very successful launch of the Q, Motorola clearly wants to be a player in the mobile computing/mobile LOB area.

LG-Nortel, Polycom, and Thomson all committed to building hardware SIP phones that include the new “Communicator phone experience”. This is an awkward term for something very cool: you see a user interface on your desktop phone that looks, and acts, like the desktop, mobile, and browser-based Communicator interfaces. For example, your phone can show your Communications Server contact list (including your MSN, Yahoo, and AIM contacts if you’re using PIC). Gupta and Raikes showed one such device, along with a Tatung cordless USB SIP phone. (I definitely want one of these!)

Raikes closed with a two-fold call to action: deploy Active Directory, because it’s the unified directory foundation for all of Microsoft’s communications services; and evaluate Exchange Server 2007 when beta 2 ships in July.

In light of IBM’s announcement, who wins the day? Based solely on announced ship dates, IBM will be to market first. However, Microsoft announced a much broader portfolio of technologies (not to mention the Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging feature set), and the Microsoft solutions can easily be deployed anywhere there’s Active Directory. Given how fast Microsoft has been taking real-time communications market share from IBM, I think I know which way I’d bet.

Updated: edited to fix a couple of typos and add a link to this post on using Exchange UM and LCS 2005 with Asterisk.

This is good news; Microsoft released a new version of their Windows Mobile emulator that correctly emulates the Messaging and Security Feature Pack. I demoed the MSFP on the emulator at the “Get Ready” event in Oslo, but all I could show was the policy application process. That works no matter what kind of connection you have (e.g. it worked OK when what I had was plain TCP/IP from the emulator to the Exchange server virtual machine). However, the push e-mail feature only works over cellular/GPRS networks, which the emulator didn’t emulate. Now it does, so I should be able to do a much richer demo in Johannesburg.

I’ve had a fun afternoon playing around with Cloudmark Server Edition, an Exchange plugin that uses Cloudmark’s collaborative filtering network to block spam. It has an excellent reputation for effectiveness, but so far I can’t get past the unfortunate fact that it requires a service account that has permissions on all mailboxes that it’s supposed to protect. This account must be a member of the Domain Admins and Enterprise Admins groups, and it must have Exchange Administrator rights on the entire Exchange organization. This represents a serious potential security exposure, because if that account is compromised it’s game over.

John Fontana wrote a detailed (as always) piece on Exchange 2007 after attending TechEd. He does a fair job of pointing out the changes that Exchange 2007 brings, including tying the Exchange routing architecture to Active Directory and the addition of new server roles that give you more flexibility in deployment. Some folks reported Fontana’s story as a net negative towards Exchange, but they left out some of the money quotes, including:

But Wenzel says the need for unified messaging, a major new feature of Exchange 2007, is driving his upgrade plan along with improvements in Outlook Web Access and search

In that same vein, Fontana’s story quotes Peter Pawlak of Directions on Microsoft as saying that “It is not trivial connecting a PBX to Exchange, and people will not [change] out their PBX for this product.” I can’t speak for “people”, but I know that many of the customers I’ve spoken to about Exchange UM are ready to do exactly that because they see the cost savings of eliminating legacy voice mail systems as well worth the one-time cost to upgrade to VoIP-capable PBXes– something that many customers are considering anyway.