Unified Communications starts officially today

Check out the UC site, and do a quick read on the end user stories. This is good stuff and it's starting to hit our company offices in the field already. Presence, VoIP, read voicemail's, faxes in the inbox, listen to email, IM, videoconferencing, PBX integration, etc.

Here's a nice overview description from the UC site:

For users, the telephone becomes an intuitive part of their computing experience with click-to-call functionality and menu-based tools for call forwarding, conference calling, and videoconferencing. Exchange Server 2007 takes over voice mail and faxes, delivering them alongside e-mail and calendaring to users via Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. It even provides dial-in support so users can listen to their voice mails, e-mails, and calendars over the phone...

When I was working in our Nashville office last week for DevLink, we had several meetings in the Memphis room, and it has a new device from Microsoft, called the Microsoft RoundTable. It's pretty cool. It acts as a conference phone, as well as a videoconferencing bridge. Connect it into your laptop during the meeting, and it's works with the updated Live Meeting 2007 product. It's slick looking and really enhances the meeting experience.

I've also mentioned that I really like the new Office Communicator 2007 product. It's has some interesting enhancements - like the ability to scope the contacts, which impact what type of information they can get about you in Communicator.

Lots of good stuff in this suite of communication products. As always, the real value is when these products are combined!