- Exchange UM: Filling a Gap in the World of UC
-
In a recent article, Blair Pleasant observes that many organizations are taking a long time to reap the potential benefits of Unified Communications. She explains that they see difficulty and expense, whether they (1) upgrade their existing systems to full UC, or (2) try to extend them with systems from other vendors.
It’s not hard to see why a third alternative (the “forklift upgrade”) is often not considered. Companies make substantial investments in their internal telephone systems, especially those multi-button feature phones that no-one seems quite to know how to use fully. The cost of replacement is not easy to justify.
In many of the same organizations, Microsoft Office Communications Server is the platform of choice (and with good reason) for presence, instant messaging, and many kinds of rich collaboration. However, the PBX and its constellation of phone extensions may remain isolated from this world as the customer contemplates their depreciation.
One day, users will take a fully integrated UC solution for granted. That will include not only voice communication, but video, and other forms of media and interaction. For those customers already running Microsoft Office Communications Server, the path ahead is clear: they can choose to enable Enterprise Voice, video, conferencing and so on, when they retire the PBX.
Customers now using (or planning to use) Microsoft Exchange 2007 or 2010 have another path on the route to Unified Communications. Exchange Unified Messaging (UM) provides voice mail, and speech-enabled access Exchange and Active Directory. UM works excellently in conjunction with the voice capabilities of Office Communications Server, of course. But it also works with most popular (and some not-so-popular) makes and models of PBX and IP PBX.
This allows the customer to obtain the benefits of UM while continuing to extract value from their investment in the PBX. And when the time comes to migrate to Office Communications Server for voice, UM will be ready for that, too.
- Part 2 of 5 - Keith Kabza, MVP, and Blain Barton discuss OCS 2007/Exchange 2010
-
Part-2 - is posted below!
The rest of the series is being delivered every week for 5 weeks!
Part 1 – Learn about Exchange 2010/OCS Integration features –
http://dpeeast.hosted.panopto.com/CourseCast/Viewer/Default.aspx?id=97439256-efc4-48a0-863b-8e69ffbefe13
Part 2 – Learn about Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging features
http://dpeeast.hosted.panopto.com/CourseCast/Viewer/Default.aspx?id=6af76b34-f8ae-4fad-b156-54f7ead5c34f
Part 3 – Learn about OCS 2007 R2 Dial-in Conferencing
Part 4 – Learn about PIC Federation and the new XMPP Gateway
Part 5 – Gotuc.net OCS Portal for Developers and IT Pros
- Voice Mail Preview FAQ (Part 4)
-
This is the final part of the frequently-asked questions list that I’ve put together for Exchange 2010’s Voice Mail Preview feature. You may want to read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 before reading this.
If Voice Mail Preview is not completely accurate, how should I use it?
You may find that you have a better experience with Voice Mail Preview when you don’t try to read the preview too carefully, word by word. Instead, look for names, (telephone) numbers and phrases such as “Call me back” or “I need to talk” that indicate what your caller might want.
Voice Mail Preview is not intended for dictation. It is not intended to answer the question: “Exactly what did the caller say?” However, from time to time it may in fact do just this.
Voice Mail Preview is there to help the user answer questions such as:
· Is this voice message related to my work?
· Is this voice message important to me?
· Did the caller leave a number? Is it different from any numbers that I may have listed for them?
· Does the caller consider this voice message urgent?
· Should I step out of this meeting to call back this person?
· I was expecting a call to confirm my earlier request. Is this the call, and did they in fact confirm?
Do I have any control over how Voice Mail Preview works for me?
Yes. If Voice Mail Preview is available to you (this depends on whether the Dial Plan language is supported, and whether your administrator has allowed you to use the feature), you can enable and disable it. In fact, there are two settings. You’ll find them in the Exchange Control Panel, which is accessible from Outlook 2010 via the Manage Voice Mail button under the File tab.
Accessing UM personal configuration from Outlook 2010
From the Outlook Web App (OWA) in Exchange 2010, access Exchange Control Panel by selecting Options.
In Exchange Control Panel, select the Phone (left) and Voice Mail (top) tabs to see the UM configuration values. The Voice Mail Preview settings are in the lower right.
Voice Mail Preview configuration in Exchange Control Panel
In the screen shot above, both options are checked. This is the default behavior, if UM is supported for your Dial Plan language (and your administrator has not restricted its use). UM will try to create Voice Mail Previews for you when it makes voice messages, that is:
1. A caller (or user) leaves a message because you do not answer your phone.
2. In Outlook Voice Access, you address and record a voice message to one or more recipients.
Notice that it’s you who receives the voice mail in scenario 1, but other people who receive it in scenario 2 (unless you’re sending to yourself). Some users might wish to disable Voice Mail Preview in scenario 2 if they usually send voice messages in a language that Voice Mail Preview doesn’t support. Another reason to disable scenario 2, perhaps temporarily, is if you are about to send a long voice message where it’s important that recipients not be distracted by a Preview that might be inaccurate.
- Voice Mail Preview FAQ (Part 3)
-
This is the third part of the frequently-asked questions list that I’ve put together for Exchange 2010’s Voice Mail Preview feature. You may want to read Part 1 and Part 2 before reading this.
What happens if I get Voice Mail in more than one language?
In a UM Dial Plan, at most one language is used for Voice Mail Preview. Roughly speaking, a UM Dial Plan defines a collection of interconnected phones, in a customer site, that share the same numbering plan and for which UM is the voice mail system. Many companies have only one UM Dial Plan. UM will always attempt Voice Mail Preview, where enabled, in the default Dial Plan language (if this language is supported for Voice Mail Preview: see Part 2).
If a user has a mailbox that is UM-enabled in a US English Dial Plan, all their Voice Mail Previews will be created in US English. If, for example, they were to receive a Voice Mail in which the caller spoke in French, or German, or Turkish, the Preview would still be constructed on the assumption that the caller was speaking English. Almost certainly, every word of the Preview would be wrong.
Does the system “know” when a Voice Mail Preview is very inaccurate?
The system computes a confidence for every Preview that it creates. Loosely speaking, this measures how well the system thinks it did in matching the sounds in the recording with words, numbers and phrases in its repertoire. If the system found it easy to find matches, the confidence will be high. A higher confidence tends to be associated with a higher accuracy, but there is not an exact relationship.
The automatic speech recognition system cannot itself determine accuracy. If it could, it could “tune itself” and eventually become perfect. For the moment, accuracy can only be measured (in tests) with human intervention.
If the calculated confidence falls below a certain value, UM will indicate this by showing the words “Confidence is low” above the Preview. If these words are displayed, it is very unlikely that the Preview text will be accurate. Messages in which the Preview was constructed in the wrong language (see previous answer) will almost always be assigned a low confidence.
Does the system learn from its mistakes?
Automatic speech recognition software calculates a confidence in the preview, but it has no way to decide which words are wrong, and which are correct.
However, the system does try to learn from the environment to improve accuracy. For example, Exchange UM tries to match the caller’s telephone number (if provided) amongst the user’s Personal Contacts and in Active Directory. If the UM finds a match, it will include the name of the caller, along with its standard lists of names and words, when running automatic speech recognition on the voice recording.
- Keith Kabza - MVP and Blain Barton discuss OCS 2007/Exchange 2010 (Part 1 of 5)
-
I've been chatting with Keith Kabza Microsoft Partner and MVP at some of the local Florida events. I met up with him at the Microsoft Tampa Office to put together some videos on OCS 2007 R2 and Exchange 2010 and some of the benefits and features around the products.
Take a look and tell us what you think!
Part-1 - is posted below!
The rest of the series is being delivered every week for 5 weeks!
Part 1 – Learn about Exchange 2010/OCS Integration features –
http://dpeeast.hosted.panopto.com/CourseCast/Viewer/Default.aspx?id=97439256-efc4-48a0-863b-8e69ffbefe13
Part 2 – Learn about Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging features
Part 3 – Learn about OCS 2007 R2 Dial-in Conferencing
Part 4 – Learn about PIC Federation and the new XMPP Gateway
Part 5 – Gotuc.net OCS Portal for Developers and IT Pros
- Top Ten Reasons to Move to Exchange Server 2010 in 2010
-
As we start
the New Year with Exchange 2010 in market, I wanted to
share more of the stories we are hearing from our customers. At launch, we
highlighted how a few of our
customers, Lifetime Products, Morgan Keegan and Global Crossing are utilizing the new features in
Exchange 2010. But, now with a couple months since launch, it is
incredibly rewarding to hear how so many customers are benefiting from Exchange
2010.
In the spirit of a top 10 list for the
New Year, here are 10 quotes from some of your fellow IT Pros that speak to how
Exchange 2010 is helping them and their companies work better:
1. Offering Larger Mailboxes While
Lowering Storage Costs : Cell C used the improved I/O performance of
Exchange 2010 to purchase less expensive storage that enabled supporting large
mailboxes at low cost. "We were looking at a very expensive storage area
network (SAN) solution with third-party archiving, and our work with Microsoft
Services consultants helped us to identify this DAS SATA solution, which costs
about one-fifth as much," said Andrew McNair, Wintel Infrastructure
Manager, Cell C says. That represents a cost
savings of about R1.8 million (U.S.$230,000).
2. Easy Online Mailbox Moves: MedcoEnergi
wanted to improve availability for its increasingly mobile work force. Moving
mailboxes between databases was time-consuming and required taking users
offline. As a result, MedcoEnergi administrators worked at night or on weekends
to avoid downtime. "With Exchange Server 2010, we can move mailboxes during
office hours-in fact, I was accessing my own e-mail during a migration and I
didn't even realize it had happened," said Cecep Saefudin,
Manager-Infrastructure Services, Medco Energi Internasional.
3.
Improved e-Discovery and
Multi-mailbox Search: Binaria expects the new multi-mailbox search
feature to help specialized users, such as compliance officers and auditors,
improve their productivity. "We need to be able to search e-mail messages for
legal reasons. In Chile, we have a finance code that requires us to keep
all e-mail messages for a minimum of five years. It is a massive volume. We
used to spend one or two days looking for information we needed for legal
requirements. Now, with multi-mailbox search in Exchange Server 2010, we can
find what we need in an hour or less. This is exactly what we were looking for,
and it's a key benefit for us," said Julio Sandoval, Head of Middleware,
Binaria. That's a 90 percent improvement in discovery time for Binaria.
4.
Save Costs with Server
Consolidation: By consolidating multiple messaging environments into one
high-availability solution, the City of Växjö is cutting IT costs. The city
estimates that by deploying Exchange Server 2010 mailbox servers with
direct-attached storage and SATA hard disk drives, it has saved more than
$400,000 in hardware costs compared to the cost of deploying a SAN. It will
also save up to $110,500 in labor costs through simplified administration.
Moreover, although the city purchased new server computers for its Exchange
Server 2010 solution, it expects an immediate return on investment in both
licensing and hardware costs when it eliminates the existing six servers and
the backup tape solutions running in its old environment. "Exchange Server 2010
is a much more affordable solution because we can use regular servers with
direct-attached storage. So in addition to improving availability, we have
saved a lot of money," said Per Andersson, IT Manager at the City of Växjö.
5. Continuous Availability: Using
Exchange Server 2010, Lion Nathan will improve its failover process and
ability to support its new disaster recovery center. The company is
implementing database availability group (DAG), a new capability that combines
on-site and off-site data replication into a single high availability solution
that helps protect its Exchange environment from downtime. "Because e-mail is
such an important part of our business, the more redundancy and site resiliency
we can build in, the better. With Exchange Server 2010, failover or switchover
becomes an easily definable and executable process. Often the failover can be
performed without users knowing that it occurred," said Brett Watkins, Systems
Manager, Lion Nathan.
6. Improved User Productivity:
Mobitel
will also be able to increase the size of employee mailboxes to 2 GB while also
increasing the overall performance of the mailboxes. With access to their
inboxes from the Outlook desktop client and Outlook Web App using the browser
of their choice, the employees will have more flexibility in how they work.
Finally, users can take advantage of features like conversation view and faster
search capabilities to help them find the information they need more quickly. "Users
will spend much less time searching and categorizing items in their inboxes,
which will help them be more productive," says Valentin Dominko, Head of IT
Infrastructure, Mobitel.
7. Enhanced Role Based Access Control
(RBAC): Carnival Cruise Lines plans to use the Role Based Access
Control (RBAC) feature in Exchange Server 2010 to provide permissions to groups
within its organization and better distribute management. Using RBAC,
administrators can give teams such as security or help desk the rights to
perform administrative tasks that align closely with their roles and areas of
responsibility. "We have a widely distributed management model. The
security team handles mailboxes and distribution lists. The operations team
handles the day-to-day functionality of Exchange Server to keep it running.
When we implement unified messaging, we'll have a communications team
responsible for that. Having RBAC roles within Exchange Server and the ability
to customize them will help us to distribute administrative functionality in a
more granular fashion than we could in the past," said Tom DeLuca, Supervisor,
End-User Engineering, Carnival Cruise Lines.
8. Improved System Uptime: Telecom Italia will use the new Database Availability
Group feature to improve availability, and it will replace its five storage
area networks with lower cost direct-attached storage. "With Exchange Server
2010, we expect to have better than 99.99 percent uptime for our employees.
Overall, we will have much better availability than before," said Maria Pia
Abbagnano, Corporate Internet Messaging Services Manager, Telecom Italia. As a result, the company expects to
save €350,000 (U.S.$520,000) annually in maintenance costs.
9. Greater Compliance: The Cell C IT
department will use improved compliance features in Exchange Server 2010 such
as retention capabilities and multi-mailbox search to reduce the amount of time
spent on compliance activities "With Exchange Server 2010, we can give the
auditors permission to pull mail out of mailboxes themselves. Now the
nine hours a month I spend on compliance will be cut down to zero," said Andrew
McNair, Wintel Infrastructure Manager, Cell C.
10. Easy to use Retention Policies: Using
retention policies in Exchange Server 2010, administrators can apply retention
settings to specific items or folders in a mailbox, at a per-individual or
per-organization level. The retention polices applied to messages appear inside
the message, so employees can more easily identify when an e-mail is set to
expire and, if necessary, move it to another folder to retain it beyond the
expiration date. Employees can also set their own retention policies for any
folder in the mailbox. "We can provide guidelines about what constitutes
important messages they need to keep, but the technology really helps us by
providing these retention policies," said Paul Sanderson, Technical Lead, British Sky Broadcasting Group.
2009 was a challenging year for
everyone, but it is exciting to see that Exchange 2010 organizations are
improving everyday productivity and meeting the demand to do more with
less.
If you haven't done so already, the
Exchange Server 2010 bits are available for download now. As always, keep the
feedback coming!
Julia White
Director, Exchange Product Management
- Voice Mail Preview FAQ (Part 2)
-
This is the second part of the frequently-asked questions list that I’ve put together for Exchange 2010’s Voice Mail Preview feature. You may want to read Part 1 before reading this.
Why ‘Preview’? Why not ‘Transcription’ or ‘Speech to Text’?
Names are important, and we thought hard about this one. It’s important to set users’ expectations appropriately. Voice Mail Preview does not necessarily produce text that’s the same as what the caller said in their voice message. In fact, it is usually inaccurate in some way. To call it Transcription would be to suggest a more perfect result than is generally achievable. Preview suggests that the reader should be able to gain an idea of the voice content, which is closer to the real capability of the feature.
How accurate is a Voice Mail Preview?
That depends on the content of the voice recording.
Speech recognition is very difficult for software, even under ideal conditions. Voice mails are already especially difficult for automatic speech recognition because:
- The sound is often transmitted by devices and networks that discard information at low and high frequencies, and
- The person leaving the message is unknown to the speech recognition system, so it has no idea of what their particular voice sounds like. The system must use an averaged-out approximation of speech patterns, for a given culture.
The average accuracy of Exchange 2010 Voice Mail Preview for callers speaking English, with US English accents, is between 70% and 80%. This means that about 1 word in every 4 in a typical Voice Mail Preview will be wrong. Accuracies can be higher than this. They can also be much lower.
What makes a Voice Mail Preview more or less accurate?
Voice Mail Preview is likely to be more accurate when the following conditions are met:
- The speaker speaks with an accent, pacing and intonation that are well matched by the tuning of the speech recognition. The speaker must, of course, use a language to which the system is attuned. A message left by person speaking English normally with a “middle American” accent should produce a more accurate preview than one left by a person speaking very quickly and/or softly with a pronounced regional (or non-American) accent.
- The speaker leaves a “typical” voice mail, and does not use unusual names or words (e.g. technical jargon, archaic forms of speech).
- The telephone call is free of background noise, echo and audio drop-out.
Clearly, some of these factors cannot be controlled. Therefore, Voice Mail Previews will sometimes be inaccurate.
In which languages is Voice Mail Preview available?
In Exchange 2010, Voice Mail Preview will be offered in the following language UM language packs:
- English (US)
- English (Canada)*
- French (France)
- Italian
- Portuguese (Portugal)*
- Polish*
At the time of writing, language packs marked with a star* were not yet available. The Understanding Unified Messaging Languages topic on Microsoft TechNet has an up-to-date listing. The article also contains links from which the language packs can be downloaded.
The goal is to offer Voice Mail Preview in as many UM language packs as possible. Later releases may extend the supported set.
- It Is the Mindset, Not the Skill Set...
-
In the last post, I
had mentioned my research whitepaper titled "Preparing
for Innovation: Understanding How IT Organizational Change Can Help Drive
Success with Unified Communications". If you lead or manage a technology team and haven't
read this paper yet, I'd encourage you to read it.
One of the issues that I tackled in this research was "who
administers Unified Communications"? I wonder whether some of you have pondered
this topic within your team or in your organization.
This research reminded me of this insight
that what makes you successful in an organization are not just your technical
skills but also your soft-skills. Beyond just technical knowledge,
leads/managers in technical organizations do look for "soft skills" such as
good interpersonal communications, charisma, and the ability to talk about
technology in terms that others can understand easily.
Here is a piece from the paper to give you a
taste of what this paper entails:
Who
Administers Unified Communications?
Since some products in the Unified
Communications suite are relatively new, expecting to find someone with
hands-on experience of UC is not a realistic expectation. Instead, the ideal
candidate for this position, as expressed by many IT managers in the research,
combines a particular attitude with some basic experience which is likely to
already exist in the organization. As one CIO said of this position, "It's the mindset, not the skill set."
What is needed here is someone who has a technical aptitude and who enjoys
learning. UC is an evolving space, and both interest and learning skills will
be necessary to keep pace.
Beyond that, the general consensus is that a
candidate for UC Administrator in a Microsoft implementation needs a basic but
solid grounding in Microsoft® Windows® Server and Exchange Server
technology, which makes for a natural transition into this role for a systems
engineer with that experience. In fact, the position tends to be seen as a
natural extension of the Exchange Administrator role, which underscores again
the importance of the server team to Microsoft UC deployment. As far as
telephony goes, the UC Administrator need only know enough to be able to
communicate well with the PBX/telephony team and find out what they need, or
hire an outsourced telephony vendor to help with the voice deployments.
My goal is to get you thinking about not just
about your technical skills but also what else makes you
successful in your organization. After all, organizations are social
systems! The truth is that as complexity of the technologies grows, the
organizations will evolve as well. And when your organization changes, what
will be your place in it?
- Voice Mail Preview FAQ (Part 1)
-
Voice Mail Preview is one of the Exchange 2010 features that’s received a lot of attention. Over the past few months, I’ve received many messages from users who have questions about it. A few questions appeared much more often than others, so I found it, err, convenient to put together a frequently-asked-questions list for Voice Mail Preview. In my next few blog postings, I’d like to share these questions (and my answers) with you.
What is Voice Mail Preview?
Voice Mail Preview is a feature of Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging. If you receive your voice mail through Exchange Unified Messaging, you may see that voice mails contain text when they arrive. The text is produced by passing the voice recording through Microsoft automatic speech recognition technology.
Figure 1. Voice Mail Preview in Microsoft Outlook 2010
Does Voice Mail Preview mean that my Voice Mail is Searchable?
Yes. The words and phrases in the Voice Mail Preview are automatically indexed, so your Voice Mails can appear in searches. You can also use Outlook (2007 or later) or Outlook Web App (Exchange 2010) to add text in the Notes field if you need to add additional keywords for search.
Do I need to use Outlook or OWA to receive Voice Mail Previews?
No. The preview will be provided, as body text, in any e-mail client capable of reading messages from Exchange 2010. This includes mobile mail clients. However, Outlook and Outlook Web App will provide a richer rendering of the voice message and preview. In Outlook 2010, for example, the clicking on the preview text will cause audio playback to begin at about that position. This is useful, for example, when checking a telephone number that was spoken by the caller, before calling back.
- Managing Complexity in Unified Communications
-
HP and Microsoft recently announced that they will be working together to provide solutions based on Exchange Server and SQL Server that are easy to deploy, and easy to manage.
When it comes to interfacing Exchange to the world of telephony (via Microsoft Office Communication Server, or some kind of PBX), the planning often requires in-depth experience of many areas of technology. As one of the Global System Integration partners for Microsoft Unified Communications Solutions, HP has for years been involved in bringing Exchange Unified Messaging to many of our customers. In May 2009, HP and Microsoft announced an initiative specifically in the UC area.
With the intense interest in software and services as complementary approaches to the solutions that our customers seek, it’s great to know that so much thought and effort is being directed to their effective delivery and operation. The goal of solutions providers is to make things simple for the customer. In a world of heterogeneous platforms, technologies and devices, there is often some irreducible complexity in the systems architecture. Partnerships such as this will help to bring the benefit of these solutions to the people who need them.
- Microsoft and HP Agree to invest $250 Million to Simplify Technology Environments
-
Last Tuesday, January 13, 2010, Microsoft and HP announced an agreement to invest $250 Million over the next three years to significantly simplify technology environments. This is not something that is just targeted at the large enterprises but meant to benefit businesses of all sizes! Here’s the announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/jan10/01-13inftoapppr.mspx.
I’m sure some of you are wondering why I’m posting about this here and why I care. That is a great question so let me answer it. :-)
The agreement includes investments in Exchange and turnkey solutions for the cloud environment. Here’s the snippet from the announcement:
Improved application performance, reliability and availability for some of the industry’s top business applications including Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server, by creating a deeply optimized “machine” environment. This is achieved through turnkey, pre-integrated server, storage, networking and application packages. These data management and e-mail machines provide “push-button” simplicity in deployment and management.
Of course, it’s not just the Exchange piece, but the entire package that will help make things more simple. When you couple the management tools from both Microsoft and HP to remotely manage and monitor the environment as well as “plug and play” deployments, there is definitely a lot to be hopeful about.
Since the announcement was just made and the details and engineering work still need to be hammered out, I don’t have any insights on the specific solutions that will hit the market, but I am definitely going to keep my eye out. I just wanted to make sure you saw this and know that Microsoft is serious about the cloud environment and how Exchange fits into the architecture.
Harold Wong
- Removing Migration Barriers One (Lotus) Note at a Time…
-
Switching From Lotus Notes to Exchange
and SharePoint Just Got Easier With New Migration Tools and a Free Training
Offer for Notes Professionals
In my
job, I'm privileged to spend a lot time with current and prospective customers.
In the last six months, as I've met with companies switching from Lotus Notes
to Microsoft, I have consistently heard two requests: "How can you make it
easier for me to migrate to Microsoft?" and, "How can I get smarter on
Microsoft's technologies?"
Lotus
Notes professionals are some of the most experienced information technologists
in the world, but more and more they are finding themselves applying their
talents to a shrinking canvas. Every credible independent third party source
and industry analyst validates this trend. In fact, two new pieces of evidence
underscore this:
- At Indeed.com, a job search site, you can see
that the percentage of Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint-related job postings
has skyrocketed, more than doubling in the past four years while the number of
Lotus Notes and Domino-related job postings declined by nearly half for the
same time period.
- Ipsos,
an independent researcher, found that IBM's e-mail market share in the United
States has shrunk to less than 10% among businesses with more than 500 people -
and the picture is not much brighter in the rest of the world. (There is
a +- 4% margin of error on these figures.)
|
|
|
|
Organizational Share |
|
|
|
|
Exchange Share |
Notes Share |
|
|
|
|
2009 |
2009 |
|
|
Companies with >500 PCs |
US |
74% |
7% |
|
|
Canada |
63% |
16% |
|
|
UK |
85% |
9% |
|
|
Germany |
64% |
27% |
|
|
Australia |
71% |
21% |
|
|
Brazil |
44% |
19% |
|
|
Russia |
53% |
12% |
|
|
China |
45% |
30% |
Data source: World-Wide Email Share Research November 2009, survey of
3442 IT professionals, conducted by Ipsos Research, Microsoft primary
research
So,
in this environment, some Lotus professionals are looking to the future.
Microsoft Skills Builder:
Complimentary Training to First 500 Lotus Notes Professionals
Today,
I'm happy to announce a training offer for Lotus professionals to help them
meet the growing demand for expertise with Microsoft business productivity
technologies. This training offer is available to 500 Lotus professionals at no
cost on a first come, first served basis. To qualify, Lotus Professionals
can e-mail msb@microsoft.com
with their name and valid e-mail address. Participants can select from a
menu of Microsoft Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communications Server
training classes to update their skills - at no cost to participants!
Easier Migrations
In an effort to make migration painless and more accessible,
we're working closely with three of the best companies in the business: Binary
Tree, CASAHL Technologies and Quest Software. These three partners have
migrated over 35 million users from Notes to Microsoft in the last decade, so
their expertise is second to none. Each of them is announcing new
solutions over the next several days to help customers migrate more easily and
more cost effectively.
Julia White
Director, Exchange Product Management
- IBM Panasonic “Win” = Keeping a Notes Customer
-
In advance of Lotusphere, IBM is touting
a big cloud win with Panasonic who will be using
LotusLive for 320,000 people, and IBM is claiming this as a replacement of
Microsoft Exchange. These claims around Panasonic compel me to shed some
light on the real facts. Panasonic
was already using Notes worldwide, and fewer than 4% of their employees were
using Exchange Server - most of them in North America. As with many
recent IBM claims, this win is little more than keeping an existing
customer. Then again, with a
multi-year trend of declining Lotus market share, perhaps keeping
an existing customer is a win.
Beyond IBM's spin, the important aspect this news
is the impact of the cloud. We know from years of delivering Microsoft Online Services that there is growing worldwide interest in software plus
services, especially among Notes customers who make up 70% of Exchange
Online and SharePoint Online customers. IBM's
approach reinforces Microsoft's Software plus Services strategy.
Giving customers choice and flexibility in software delivery is an
important evolution for the cloud. The cloud is here, and for an
increasing number of businesses, it is ready for prime time.
- Neeti Gupta And Her Role At Microsoft
-
My name
is Neeti Gupta and I am a Senior Product Manager, Unified Communications
(Exchange and Office Communications Server) Audience Marketing at Microsoft.
I am
very excited to participate in the BIEB blog and write about Microsoft
communications products that I use every day at work and at home. Let me tell
you a little bit about myself.
My
journey at Redmond campus started 5 years back when I came to Microsoft
Research (MSR) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT, I
focused on social and technological aspect of wireless
technologies (also
see this paper). At Microsoft, I started
as a MSR intern working on field deployment of AURA system. After my internship, I
moved to Windows Mobile user experience team and helped ship various versions
of the product. Then, I made the transition to product management from user
experience and started applying my understanding of customer
needs, market environments, social and technological trends to Unified
Communications product line.
My first challenge at the Unified Communications group
was to lead research to understand how IT organizational change can help drive
success with Unified Communications. The result of this effort was a whitepaper which
has become a must read for any IT organization that is preparing their teams
for Unified Communications. Amongst other things that I gleaned from this
research, it became clear to me that IT, helpdesk and trainers in customer
organizations need assistance on how to help their end users better utilize
communication tools. Last year, I collaborated with Microsoft user assistance
team on UC Adoption and Training Kit (download it from here or browse online). Both these efforts have
been very well received by customers and partners alike as these projects push
technical teams to tackle the social aspect of Unified Communication
technologies.
Currently,
I am responsible for the following Microsoft websites and these are great links
for you to keep up-to-date on our products, so don't forget to add them to your
favorites.
They
say that a picture is worth a thousand words - here is a video introduction and a
little demonstration about communicator integration with Office 2010. Also,
stay in touch by reading my product tips and tricks through OC blog.
- What's the difference between Unified Messaging and Unified Communications?
-
In my previous post, I spent some time outlining the features of Exchange Unified Messaging (UM). From time to time, I'm asked to explain how UM relates to Microsoft's Unified Communications (UC) strategy and products. In this post, I'll try to give a personal view on the relationship between UM and UC.
UM is a part of UC. In other words, UC includes UM, but UC also includes a lot of other important products and technologies. A customer who uses Microsoft's Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Office Communications Server products has an opportunity to experience many more UC scenarios than a customer using Exchange (and UM) only. Office Communications Servers' support for enterprise class presence, instant messaging and voice, combined with the ability of Office, SharePoint and Exchange to use this support, creates many useful and interesting new possibilities for the end user.
A simple example of the power and convenience of UC can be seen when a user receives a voice message (created by Exchange UM) from another user and opens it in Outlook. Not only can they listen to the message, but they can see the other user's presence status, and start an instant messaging or voice conversation with them. Not only are there more ways for users to communicate with each other, but they are woven together into an intuitive, unified experience by the software.
UC offers so many possible combinations and sequences of interactive communication that it is easy to be dazzled by the details and lose sight of the underlying principles. The user is placed at the center: they are able to communicate with others from the most convenient device, with the most appropriate method, at the right time. Unified Messaging (UM) participates in some of these scenarios (indeed, it is an integral part of many of them), but is just a component of the larger UC picture.
In the "old world", customers had a PBX and voice mail. Now, they can have a Unified Communications system, where Office Communications Server plays the part of the PBX (and much more), and Exchange Unified Messaging replaces legacy voice mail. In this "new world", many new possibilities have opened up, but some familiar patterns and interactions still occur.
