Unified Communications

Not normally in my repertoire but I did a Unified Communications demo last week at a conference, and since today's the day that UC is being launched I thought it a good time to blog about it.

In case you're not familiar with Unified Communications, it's the banner name for the software from Microsoft which aims to bridge the divide between computers and telephones with two integrated servers: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

We've been using this stuff internally for the last while so last week I was able to show how Office Communicator 2007 can turn your e.g. laptop into an advanced VoIP "softphone", with integrated presence, the ability to call anyone in your contacts list with one click, and also show how voicemails can flow across the network just like normal emails: they show up in your inbox so you can sort them, annotate them, forward them etc. In the demo I set up a bluetooth headset to be the default microphone for Communicator while using my laptop speakers as the default speakers, so when I made a call the whole conversation was audible to those in the room. We took the opportunity to announce during the call that all the attendees were getting a free bluetooth headset (plus a bluetooth dongle in case their PC wasn't already bluetooth enabled). Since I was demo'ing in a conference hall in a hotel I was using the hotel wireless network, so it was a nice way to show how it (e.g presence, messaging, etc.) all fits together when out of the office.

The other part of the demo was on Microsoft Office RoundTable which is a conferencing device which allows a 360-degree view of the participants in a meeting so you can see facial expressions (who's paying attention!). Also has neat voice recognition so that the active speaker is always highlighted in a dedicated pane. Sound complicated? Just plug it into your USB port and off you go :-)