At Interop Las Vegas 2009 , HP and Microsoft Corp. today announced a four-year strategic global initiative to deliver an end-to-end unified communications and collaboration solution. As part of their Frontline Partnership , the two companies expect to invest up to an additional $180 million in product...

The recent National Broadband Network (NBN) announcement in Australia is the best piece of news I have heard in some time. Fibre To The Home (FTTH) with speeds of 100Mbps is going to dramatically change how Australians work, play and socialise online. I haven’t heard yet if these speeds are symmetrical...

Office Communications Server 2007 is the first Microsoft product to combine enterprise-ready IM, presence, video-conferencing, web-conferencing, and VoIP telephony in one solution. In addition, OCS 2007 includes real-time videoconferencing solutions running on servers in your intranet or interoperating...

Tech.Ed 2008 has finally wrapped up... I was in Auckland for Tech.Ed NZ on Monday and Tuesday, and then in Sydney for Tech.Ed Australia from Wednesday to Friday. It was a hectic and somewhat exhausting week as I was the track/content owner for Unified Communications and Mobility, and I also presented...

I was interviewed yesterday at Tech.Ed New Zealand by Nic Romaniuk about my views on Unified Comms, and how it's changing the way people work. Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/nz/teched08/office-unified-communications.aspx (click Johan Kruse (SIC) under Other Videos on the right). ...

Yesterday I caught up with Roger Lawrence and Rick Anderson and we recorded a video discussion about Mobility Smackdown! , one of the most popular sessions at TechEd Australia. Hear about the history of Smackdown! as well as what's planned for this year. It's going to be massive - demo-offs, competitions...

Last week I caught up with Colin Lee, one of this year's presenters in the Unified Comms track at TechEd Australia and New Zealand. Deeps was around and had his video camera handy so we recorded a quick interview.  Colin discusses some of the topics he'll be presenting this year, as well as his...

See me demo RoundTable in a Vodcast which Deeps has put up at The TechNet Australia Blog . Update: for those who have asked about the flickering during the RT screencast - that actually wasn't a problem with RoundTable, LiveMeeting or OCS - it was my laptop CPU struggling to keep up with Windows...

From You Had Me At EHLO... To demonstrate upgrading a CCR cluster from Exchange 2007 RTM to SP1, I have created a video demo that takes you through the process of upgrading the passive node followed by upgrading the CMS to SP1 and finally upgrading the active node. This demo also demonstrates "Managing...

From You Had Me At EHLO... Beta 2 of Service Pack 1 Exchange Server 2007 is available for public download and preview for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. As I wrote in my blog entry, Standby Continuous Replication in Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 , SCR extends the continuous replication technology...

Ok so this post isn't really related to UC at all, but what the hey ... Over the Christmas/New Year period I finally got around to playing with my media setup at home (yep, I'm a geek alright). I now have the following hooked up and working nicely: 40" Sony Bravia HDTV Media Centre PC (Vista...

Video: The Devil wears prada .. and does Unified Comms!