Johann's Unified Communications : cool!

NBN + UC = :D

jkruse — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:19:00 GMT

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 or asymmetrical (i.e. if uplink speeds are equivalent to downlink, or not), but I guess it may be too early in the process to know.

At home I have a Naked ADSL2+ connection from Internode (via an Optus DSLAM) which is great in theory, but in practice I only get about 4Mbps down and 384Kbps up.

I work from home a lot, and at the moment at least 10% of my time is spent video-conferencing with customers and workmates. With reductions in travel budgets this is likely to increase in the coming years.

384Kbps uplink is sufficient for CIF video in Office Communicator 2007, but now in R2 we support VGA and HD video which of course have greater bandwidth requirements. Currently I have to physically travel to the office in North Ryde to send VGA or HD video, which kind of defeats the concept of Unified Communications (collaborate from anywhere – work is something you do, not somewhere you go).

So this is why I’m excited about the NBN – faster uplink speeds will enable higher fidelity video-conferencing at home, which will provide more opportunities for remote collaboration, travel reductions, flexible meetings, and work/life balance.

Now if only they could get it up and running in < 8 years :)

Microsoft Recite

jkruse — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:58:03 GMT

There is a great Technology Preview of a new product called Recite now available.

This is perfect for people like me who are (a) extremely forgetful, and (b) on the road a lot. From the Recite page:

Press “Remember” to record a thought.

Press “Search” to retrieve your thoughts. It’s that simple!

You literally speak a thought into your smartphone which is then indexed, and then later on you ask the phone what you need to remember. For example record “a wine recommendation from John Smith is 2005 Amon Ra”. Later on you ask “what was the wine recommended by John Smith?” and it will play the note back. Awesome!

Record and Retrieve your Voice Notes with Microsoft Recite

Channel 10 has just published a nice video about Microsoft Recite. 5 min to discover everything about the Technology Preview.

More info at the website (http://recite.microsoft.com), the blog(https://blogs.msdn.com/recite/) and on Twitter (http://twitter.com/recite).

Exchange Activesync protocols now open

jkruse — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 04:00:12 GMT

A further sign of Microsoft’s commitment towards being more open is that the protocols for Exchange Activesync (EAS) have now been published to the public (previously they were only available to licensees).

EAS is already built into pretty much every major smartphone/PDA out there – but now that it is open I’m sure we will see some innovative and creative apps/tools from the developer community.

Documentation of the EAS protocols is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc307725.aspx

From the press release:

REDMOND, Wash. — Dec. 18, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced it is expanding its Exchange ActiveSync Intellectual Property (IP) Licensing program, facilitated by Version 1.0 releases of technical documentation for protocols built into Exchange ActiveSync, which Microsoft posted on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) earlier this month. The posting of this documentation completes the set of Exchange ActiveSync protocols Microsoft committed to publish as part of its Interoperability Principles announced in February 2008 (http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/default.mspx).

“The Exchange ActiveSync IP Licensing program is another example of how we are continuing to deliver on our commitment to increased openness and collaboration,” said Horacio Gutierrez, vice president of intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft. “This technology is being sought out by our partners and competitors alike because it enhances their value proposition to their customers, and we believe that to be a testament to the innovation taking place at Microsoft.”

Engineering Windows 7

jkruse — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:50:57 GMT

Not UC-related, but this is awesome...

Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky and have started a blog about the planning and development of Windows 7.

Beginning with this post together we are going to start looking forward towards the “Windows 7” project. We know there are tons of questions about the specifics of the project and strong desire to know what’s in store for the next major release of Windows. Believe us, we are just as excited to start talking about the release. Over the past 18 months since Windows Vista’s broad availability, the team has been hard at work creating the next Windows product.

The audience of enthusiasts, bloggers, and those that are the most passionate about Windows represent the folks we are dedicating this blog to. With this blog we’re opening up a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7. Windows has all the challenges of every large scale software project—picking features, designing them, developing them, and delivering them with high quality. Windows has an added challenge of doing so for an extraordinarily diverse set of customers. As a team and as individuals on the team we continue to be humbled by this responsibility.

We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.

This is a great way to have dialogue with the engineering teams working on the next version of Windows, and hear about the process involved.

Check it out at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/

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