Presence
Where do instant messaging, email, voicemail, IP phone, and cell come together?
Well, if we were in circa 1995, everyone would be inventing an enterprise communications bus to pull each of these together and transform each set of data into consumables for the other platforms.
Or, a large consultancy would put together a framework for this at a multimillion cost (lets call it the Service Oriented Architecture for Communication, or SOAC :) )
Heres something novel, lets make what we have work together more efficiently, ie, IM links to email and calendar, and based on whats in the calendar, route the phone to the best spot, whether office or cell, and if I'm not available, let me retrieve my voicemail, email, or RSS feed :) through my email client on my laptop or phone?
In addition, let me see whether the person I'm trying to reach is available now, in a little bit, or not this week, and I dont want to care which IM client is being used, and call or text them via any device I choose.
This is Presence, more than just VOIP.
It is software based, not hardware based, so I can tailor it to how I do business.
And it is available through Exchange Unified Messaging, Outlook, Instant messaging with real time collaboration, Windows Mobile 5 and PBX's which Microsoft partners can deliver which can enable this routing.
