April, 2008

…goes the old saying. Telephony is old indeed, it has spent more than a century sitting at tables all over the world. Yes, people need something that looks like phone to pick up their calls, and that is why we designed devices that look like the phone that accompany Office Communicator 2007. In fact, we intentionally designed some of the USB handsets to be heavy so as to make users feel that they are lifting an old world phone experience wise. Whenever users pick up their...

What is this “Toast” thing anyway? Toast, as the OC team calls it, is a notification that appears near your desktop’s systray (i.e. the thing with the clock in it). Toast’s primary goal is to let a user know that there is an incoming communication request and to give as much context about the request as possible. Toast is divided up into two regions: Contextual information: Caller Identity Conversation Topic Invitation modality ...

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 introduces a new Conversation History feature that not only allows you to look at past conversations but does way more. Thanks to Conversation History, conversations are now contextual (subjects and past logs are persisted), new scenarios are available and user’s experienced got improved. Let’s have a closer look at what History gives us. Missed conversations: Whenever you receive an invitation to a conversation and are not...

Check it out! http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/messenger/default.mspx Instant face-to-face communication Built for corporate Mac users on Office Communications Server 2007, Messenger for Mac 7 gives co-workers new ways to communicate easily with each other in different locations or time zones. Additionally, personal users will find a few improvements for managing their contact lists. Published Tuesday, April 29, 2008 1:12 PM by octeam Filed Under: IM/Presence

A month ago I was lucky enough to attend VoiceCon Orlando 2008 with some members of our group. One of the highlights for me was a nice video during the Microsoft keynote that showed how the Microsoft RoundTable was used to connect a child with cancer to a room full of classmates at the school (they had a RoundTable) so that he could see everyone and interact with them. If you haven’t heard of it before, the RoundTable is a great technology that empowers people in ways...

I've been working on the an Add in for Outlook, using VSTO and the Communicator Automation API, which allows you to view all of your contacts while it Outlook. Outlook already gives you presence and functionality to communicate with the people for the currently selected email, but if you want to communicate with some one that isn't included on the original email, you'd have to switch to Communicator. The idea behind this Add-In is that a lot of people spend...