Last month Microsoft Research announced a product called Response Point and I quickly noted down some of my initial thoughts and linked to more information here . Since then a number of people, mainly channel partners, have asked me how this fits into our Unified Communications strategy. The simple answer...

About a week ago I popped into the Reading Audi garage to book an appointment to get my Audi looked at as I had been having problems with the back window. I booked it in for Tuesday (today) and my expectation was for them to pick up the car from work, do the work and drop it back off at work. As well...

One of the parts of my job I really enjoy doing is speaking to customer, partners and journolists about our Unified Communications and how its going to change the way in which people will communicate with each other in the future. The problem I am presented with however is how to explain the range of...

Finally the wait is over, we have now made public the betas for :- Office Communications Server 2007 beta and Office Communicator 2007 beta Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server beta Documentation for Office Communications Server 2007 beta Go forth and download !

One of the problems with most telephony systems is that small business don't want to spend their time configuring and repatching phones when someone moves from desk to desk. They have enough to worry about without having to become PBX technicians as well. To that end, a small team in Redmond has been...

I raised this question in a post a while back and after receiving a big box from Redmond today I thought now might be a good time to ask the question again :-) For those of you who have me on your IM list and had read my 'note', you would have noticed that from the 1st of Jan I stopped using my desk...

Today I spent ten minutes reading an article on 'tech-no's', found here , and thought I would share it with you. Its actually a really interesting article and I wanted to bring it to your attention. Although technology can help you communicate faster, quicker and more efficiently, if you don't want to...

At times it can be quite hard to sum up Unified Communications and more importantly why its useful to have presence and instant messaging rather than using the tried and tested technologies of email and the phone. Darren Strange today pointed me in the direction of the Electric Wand aka Ewan Dalton....

I spotted this on someone's blog today and wanted to share this with you :-) It appears that in order to communicate with a new younger generation of kids, Santa has had a meeting with the Windows Live Messenger guys at Microsoft and has signed up for Windows Live Messenger. As you can see, I had a quick...

Is it really possible to live without a phone on your desk? Is that a little too far fetched? Well lets find out ! People ask me if such a thing is ever going to happen and for now I think its kind of hard to tell. As with a lot of stuff in Unified Communications, its not only about having the technology...

Working at Microsoft, I rarely find myself running a machine with RTM software on it, but with the RTM of Exchange 2007, Windows Vista and Office 2007, I have found myself running fully released code. I am glad to say I have now managed to fix this 'problem' and got myself onto the Office Communications...

"A Tale of two meeting rooms" Hot of the heels of the first video, I am pleased to say we have another that concentrates more on Office Roundtable. Roundtable is a cracking device which enables people to video conference from a room of their choice rather than forcing people to go to a specific...

First of all I would like you to know that I am giving away a little known Microsoft employee internal tip here .... hopefully not enough Microsoft employees read this blog for it to be a problem :-) Within Microsoft in the UK, we have a number of video teleconferencing rooms which are available for...

This week I experience problems with my XBOX, to cut a long story short I can't talk to people online and to be honest this is half the fun. Like most people, after doing a little investigation I phoned xbox live support and after 10 minutes or so of listening to Beethoven I was put through to someone...

One of the things I get asked from time to time is can a partner go if they want to find out more information on EVO ... especially the E part i.e. Exchange 2007. Up until now, the answer has been www.microsoft.com/exchange/ which although has lot of information on Exchange 2007, it isn’t targeted...

First of all, let me just say sorry for not posting anything recently. I have been a little busy settling into my new role which has meant the blog has had to take a back burner, hopefully this blog will get me back into the swing of things. Over the last month, I have had a few revelations around...

One of the great things that has occurred in the last year or so is that the product groups over in Redmond have started blogging. Not only has this given the product group a public face but it has also meant that the product team can get feedback from the user community directly, this in my eyes can...

One of the great things about our Unified Communications solution, both current and future, is that it can work with the existing infrastructure that is currently in place, this means that all of the money and time spent on installing a PBX is not wasted and can still be utilised. This interop with current...

I wanted to bring to your attention a new Unified Communications site designed especially for partners. It can be found at http://partner.microsoft.com/uc ! Almost every time I talk to a partner about our Unified Communications platform, they normally ask me where they should go to learn more and...

Since the announcement at the end of June, a lot of people has asked me what exactly is Unified Communications and more importantly, where can I find more. For most people, I have sat them down and explained the idea to them including taking about the current silos of communication we have today e...

Recently we had a number of announcements around our roadmap for Unified Communications, Redmond is now looking for nominations for the 'RTC Wave 12 Private Beta'. If you are interested then email me and I will let you know more :-)

I am sure a number if you have seen this message before, well it’s now possible to customise the message to include more terse wording or perhaps the option to pay money into the IT administrators Paypal account to a bigger mailbox ;-). First of all I would say that prevention is better than a cure...

Well ... not 'bad' ... just a little sneeky :-) Recently I had a conversation with Allister Frost (the artist formally known as Exchange PM) about the technology behind the Skype platform that most people don’t tend to know about, it resulted in posting on his blog here ... well worth a read. The...

As you will be reading over the next few days, we have made a number of announcements in the last few hours around our Unified Communications vision and where we will be going over the next few years. A recording will be available here for the next two weeks. Our 'Unified Communications' platform...

Steve Clayton sent me this article a while back and I thought I would make a short post about it. The article talks about the final balance between partner and competitor with our colleagues at companies like Cisco and Avaya but also includes a mention from Zig Serafin that we will start to talk more...