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...and integrate everything into Office

This week Microsoft announced its ambitious plans to unify the various communications protocols that many of us use on a daily basis. The premise for Microsoft's project is that the company says the communications world is currently too disjointed. For example: email, instant messaging, text messaging, VoIP technologies as well as audio and video conference technologies can all be tied together. According to Microsoft, it believes that a unified communications architecture that's tightly integrated into the next version of Office will greatly improve business productivity as well as general convenience for a wide array of users. Granted, most business today rely on Microsoft's productivity suite, it makes sense for the company to step forward in this direction.

Making a splash in Office 2007, Microsoft plans to integrate more features into applications such as Outlook, Speech Server and even Exchange Server. Enterprise editions of Office will come with Communications Server 2007, a session initiation protocol (SIP) enabled real-time communications platform that will connect VoIP, IM, video, audio and voice mail all into one easy to manage application. Microsoft is also integrating instant messaging into Exchange server in a function it calls "unified messaging."

VoIP is an area that Microsoft will also be focusing on in Office 2007. With something called Office Communicator, desktop IP phones will be able to will be able to work with Office features such as voice mail storage and user notifications. Users will also be able to text message an Office-enabled VoIP line and have the message appear on the recipient's instant messaging client.

The software giant is also working vigorously with companies such as Motorola and Samsung to integrate these new features into cell phones, USB and wireless headsets as well as other handheld devices. According to Microsoft:

Microsoft Corp.’s approach to unified communications will break down today’s silos of e-mail, instant messaging, mobile and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony, and audio-, video- and webconferencing. Building on its existing partner ecosystem, Microsoft also announced new business alliances with HP, Motorola and Siemens to deliver on its vision for unified communications. Motorola will deliver mobile devices and network hardware based on Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator Mobile.

Set to be released sometime in late 2006 or early 2007, Microsoft says that if successful, this will be one of its biggest achievements and will affect the business lives of many. There will be fewer aspects of communications to manage, and costs will be reduced significantly. Complexity reduction is also a big key area that Microsoft is focusing on with this initiative. Some are worried however that this may pose a threat to fair competition if Microsoft software is the backbone of much of the communications protocols that we use today.

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Peanut Gallery
By TomZ on 6/27/2006 5:32:36 PM , Rating: 2
I see the peanut gallery is out in full force here commenting on this news item. Doesn't anybody have anything intelligent to say about this development?

I hate to break it to you, but this type of initiative is exactly what businesses are looking for - integration of all the hodge-podge communication services that corporate IT needs to deal with today.




RE: Peanut Gallery
By DigitalFreak on 6/27/06, Rating: -1
RE: Peanut Gallery
By dilz on 6/27/2006 6:51:40 PM , Rating: 2
Lock-in through the OS didn't work, so prepare for the reverse approach. If MS is able to make this work, we'll remember 2006 as the year that MS looked like it was in trouble because of a slipping release schedule, but instead moved into an undeveloped market and flourished.

I will read the article, but it sounds like MS is just doing what any business should do: find new markets while maintaining control of the old ones.


RE: Peanut Gallery
By housegroover on 7/3/2006 7:49:21 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
You might like it, but it is not good for M$ to take even more of the market away from other companies.


I don't see many companies attempting to do what Microsoft are doing....


RE: Peanut Gallery
By PrinceGaz on 6/27/2006 7:04:00 PM , Rating: 2
You might like it, but it is not good for M$ to take even more of the market away from other companies. Would you like a world where all computer software and global communications is from Micro$oft? A mega-corporation with a monopoly on an ever increasing amount of the software market just gets stronger and anyone wanting to compete with a rival product faces a harder challenge because they are seen as non-standard in more areas (like communications, where only M$ software and devices will be able to send fully-compliant verified email and other messages).

It's inevitable M$ will want to cover ever more market sectors and squeeze out the competition, or at least reduce any competition to a niche market that has little impact on mainstream business, and the more they do it, the tighter their grip on us becomes.

Email may be flawed (it is very flawed) but the last thing we need is M$ coming along with some proprietary alternative that much of the business community adopts because it is part of the next Office. It is essential that at least communication protocols remain totally open and usable by any software so long as it follows the agreed upon standard.

We've already seen Office file-formats become a closed de-facto standard which others can only do their best to convert, the last thing we want is communications to be bound to M$ software too because the day that happens is the day when you can wave goodbye to Linux and OS X, and say hello to the new dawn when everyone is locked into using Micro$oft products for everything. The dawn of hell.


RE: Peanut Gallery
By Pirks on 6/27/06, Rating: 0
RE: Peanut Gallery
By Pirks on 6/27/06, Rating: 0
RE: Peanut Gallery
By oTAL (blog) on 6/28/2006 2:50:21 PM , Rating: 2
"We've already seen Office file-formats become a closed de-facto standard which others can only do their best to convert"

Actually MS is moving away from this on the next office. Check your facts. You do have a point about proprietary stuff though. Software should be allowed to be proprietary and comercial. But communication, interfaces and file formats should be forced to adhere to well documented standards.


RE: Peanut Gallery
By akugami on 6/27/2006 8:12:05 PM , Rating: 2
I don't mind a more unified aproach to some of the various formats we use to communicate. IM's, PM's, email, VOIP, etc. But I am very wary of that someone being Microsoft doing the unifiying. I'd rather various companies like IBM, MS, Apple, Intel, etc come together and form an open standard rather than adhere to some proprietary MS standard.


RE: Peanut Gallery
By Pirks on 6/27/2006 8:58:00 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
I'd rather various companies like IBM, MS, Apple, Intel, etc come together and form an open standard rather than adhere to some proprietary MS standard.
I overheard a lot of similar talk back in Linuxmania days (late 90s/early 2000s) - yo let's join our forces and bring this ubermegaopen standard - OpenDoc, OpenGL, OpenVMS, OpenSUSE, OpenEverything - and then what? Then MS came along with its evil ClosedEverything and smashed a couple of delusions, by building stuff like DirectX and .NET - stomping on Java and OpenGL in the process. I kind of lost my blind belief in OpenEveryting those days - yeah, MS haters can yak about OpenStuff around o'clock - but the market and real people happily accept EvilClosed MS and DeadlyClosedAndWeldBeyondRecognition Apple - Apple BTW making huge money in the process. I can't say I'm against OpenEverything's naive proponents - let them enjoy their hobby, but I just don't see market, money and your average Joe happy about it. I'm all for openness, but when I see these Open things and compare to Closed things... well, hard to agree those Opens rule anything but some hi-tech areas - it looks like opennness Internet-style is not always an absolute necessity, since Internet is still open, but a lot of other things got lost, like Java (I went from it to C# and hugely enjoy the transition).

To me it's still unclear why in certain cases openness survives and why somtimes its stomped upon by MS/Apple. Seems like there's an interesting correlation - more closer to the consumer is the device - less openness is in there. So cameras, MP3 players and stuff like those are all closed, no OpenMP3/etc there, in fact totally closed iPod kicks everyone's a$$, while in Internet you don't see those Cisco boxes or Linuces/BSDs around your average Joe - hence they are much more open.

This must be the explanation, I think... and according to that the communication devices are consumer-oriented - hence no openness is bound to happen there, hence MS is about to make another big fat kill - unless Apple comes along and kicks fat Redmond butt some more, now in this segment. Or unless it's too early and the market is not ripe for that.

Sorry, I just can't see any openness possible in consumer products, according to my experience with computers since late 80s.

But you can argue communications also involve a lot of hi-tech boxes, very far from consumers - and you may be right in that, there's a place for your OpenIP or whatever - looks like the best bet would be a hybrid approach where closed down things appear on the client/consumer side (say iPod) and open things are in between (say Cisco/IPv6/SIP/etc) - something like that.


RE: Peanut Gallery
By bjacobson on 6/29/2006 9:56:58 AM , Rating: 2
As soon as businesses see the money they're throwing away locking themselves into the non-free market, the trust they're placing in MS to keep their computers working...when they see that this upgrading is costing them millions of dollars and is actually hindering their goals of security and compatibility, then they'll change. I just sorta hope they get burned first.


RE: Peanut Gallery
By neoryo on 7/1/2006 8:58:57 PM , Rating: 4
Yeah... that's is what always u said in microsoft product on every post u make.. I wonder if u get paid for that


In Soviet Russia...
By Eris23007 on 6/27/2006 4:10:45 PM , Rating: 2
Communications unify YOU!

:-P




RE: In Soviet Russia...
By Sunbird on 6/27/2006 4:13:09 PM , Rating: 4
We are the Microsoft, prepare to be officenated...


Damn...
By plowak on 6/27/2006 7:32:17 PM , Rating: 4
...my telephone just failed MS Genuine Advantage Validation!




RE: Damn...
By Xavian on 6/27/2006 8:31:34 PM , Rating: 2
this can be easily sorted, please ring 1-800-5....

oh wait, sorry you're screwed :(

seriously, if communications were unifed under a single propietary standard by microsoft no less, can you say death to the internet? Most websites i know rely on the open nature of emails in order to send activation emails for account purposes, what if you were charged for using SendMail or some such web app to send emails, because Microsoft wants their licencing fees.


RE: Damn...
By Pirks on 6/27/06, Rating: 0
Another feature
By Alphafox78 on 6/27/2006 4:12:04 PM , Rating: 2
Sound like another one of thoes features that are in office you never use...




Borg
By shabodah on 6/27/2006 4:28:50 PM , Rating: 2
Let's hope resistance is NOT futile.




They can try...
By Kishkumen on 6/27/2006 5:07:06 PM , Rating: 2
Not going to happen. Too may people with reject the idea on sheer principle alone regardless of whether it's logical or not.




MS rulz, NOT!!!
By lamborghini on 6/27/2006 5:16:38 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Me: Dude, my car won't start, what should I do? You: Dude, Boot up your PC, click on Word, open My car.doc, run the macro named "start".




yeah...
By kattanna on 6/27/2006 5:25:07 PM , Rating: 2
im sure this will all happen about the same time WinFS becomes a reality...





Its now Microsoft vs Cisco
By Lord 666 on 6/27/2006 7:12:10 PM , Rating: 2
When I was at Cisco Networkers last week, John Chamber's key note was interesting because it was the first time that he did not mention Microsoft in a long time. Cisco is moving all of their voice products (Callmanager, CVP, etc) to work on Linux and away from Microsoft.

Looking at both companies' offerings, they will now be direct competitors in the SIP "unified messaging" area. Microsoft's push into the VoIP area started around 2003 with the first roll out of Office 2003 and their Live Communications suite. So this was assumed coming, even Microsoft's IVR product (Microsoft Speech Server) was viewed as an eventual competitor to Cisco's IP-IVR.

Using Office 2007 as a conduit makes sense since corporate users spend more time in Outlook than any other app. Intergrate that with Exchange for unified messaging (just like Cisco does now for voicemail and Unity) and just call it some new name.




By UNCjigga on 6/28/2006 12:34:59 AM , Rating: 2
Seriously, how about some basic stuff like calendar sharing, IM integration that works with any service, webmail access that automatically syncs your calendar, tasks, contacts etc. that doesn't require us to use Exchange server? Microsoft should provide home users with an "Office Live" account that provides a hosted Exchange-type service with an easy, fool-proof GUI and all the basics: 2GB of email through Live Mail, blogs, family-friendly social networking and other goodies.

I hope Microsoft isn't focusing exclusively on corporate and enterprise for their "Unified Communications" strategy. If MS gave us more Live services for free, I might even feel compelled to use their browser and their search engine over Google. And more consumers getting comfortable with these services means more people upgrading to Office 2007, and more corporations comfortable rolling out Exchange 2007 (give us more Live beta services NOW to lessen the learning curve.)




LOL - why argue?
By Enoch2001 on 6/28/2006 2:11:27 AM , Rating: 2
Office is the quintessential application used in any "office" that is worth its weight in salt - why argue?

Sure there are other apps out there that are just as competitive, but Office rules the numbers - if you don't have it you're useless.

All these Office haters should deal. Your resistance is cute, but passe. Can we all move on now?




Come on Google...
By Muirgheasa on 6/28/2006 5:15:08 AM , Rating: 2
This just makes me look forward more to the day that google finally releases a product to compete with Microsofts Office/Windows dominance (although they do already have some online spreadsheets and so on, so maybe we never will see a direct competition?)




Office is FTW.
By Master Kenobi (blog) on 6/28/2006 8:03:13 AM , Rating: 2
Google isnt going to go head to head with Microsoft in the Office arena. Nobody is going to. Google will add enhanced utilities and apps to the Windows environment. ex(Desktop Search, Toolbars, maybe a google defrag or something, maybe a google NTFS Indexer) but you will never see them try to lock horns with microsoft in the arena of office. Now google might be the hype right now but from a corporate perspective, Every google product short of Google Toolbar for IE is banned in my company, and we have over 12,000 desktop computers. That stuff really screws up the windows OS, practically digs in like a virus in the case of Google Desktop.

No, definately Google will compete with Microsoft mostly on ease of use on the home PC, and with the MSN online network, but you wont find Google competing with Microsoft over Office, and Windows. Can you remember the last time you saw a competitive company that wasnt using MS Office? Yea never. The corporate standard is MS Office, you either use it like everyone else, or you get screwed when trying to communicate documents with other corporations.

It's not like Office is a POS app either, Microsoft has made it an excellent productivity package. Excel is second to NONE. It's been the frontrunner for a decade now, nobody can touch it. MS Access is simple database brought right to the desktop, and its a quick and dirty way of generating canned queries for people to run against anything, we use Sybase, Oracle, IBM DB2, and SQL Server. Access is absolutely a must-have when I need to build a set of queries for specific departments. You think they are willing to learn command line? get real. Word, a word processor that is again second to none. Wordperfect competed in the past, but these days it lags far behind, especially since Microsoft has completely interfaced all office products with each other. I can tie Word to Access, or Excel, or PowerPoint, and vice versa without any issue whatsoever. On that note, we have PowerPoint. Go to any expo, like oh say any IT expo, or non-IT expo where they put up a slideshow on a big screen or overheard, yea just about 99% of the time, that stuff is PowerPoint. Why? Because it works, and it works well. Rather than 1 end-all application, Microsoft went and built a suite of specific apps, and tied them all together seemlessly. For the home user, its not that prevalent what you can do with office. But for large corporations, thats where Office truly shines, and thats what Microsoft targets with Office, hence the name.

/rantoff




Have you tried it?
By Schrag4 on 6/28/2006 9:56:59 AM , Rating: 2
Have any of you even tried Office Communicator yet? It seems like there's a lot of 'Oh, this will suck and not be used!' being thrown around here. We tried it at our company and I really liked it. The only reason we decided not to replace our current IM client with Office Communicator was because there was no way to make the conversation window smaller (and that was obviously a deal-breaker for us).

I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about it, but trust me when I say that I really miss some of the cool features that it has, like the ability to hover your mouse over a contact and see their phone number, whether they're in a meeting, etc, (it integrates with OutLook...).




Worried...
By stmok on 6/28/2006 12:08:29 PM , Rating: 2
...For three reasons.

(1) EU's anti-trust case against Microsoft is to force them to open up specs, so they can interoperate with other people's solutions. If most of you have forgotten or are completely oblivious to IT history. Microsoft has a history of controlling protocols and standards to use against any competition. It treats them like Intellectual Property. What makes you think they won't repeat what they've done?

Does the world's legal systems need to waste more time on future anti-trust cases? You do realise that MS has over 100 anti-trust cases filed against them, don't you? (And that's only in the USA!)...So my worry is that they will abuse a situation once they've got a firm grip on it, like with this initiative.

(2) Security. The more crap they back in, the more entry attack vectors (entry points) you can use to compromise their solution. Well, at least the hackers/crackers will be happy!

(3) Allows MS to be in control of a significant amount of services. Companies won't like it and will file anti-trust cases. (Back to the courts again!)...Remember, they are a convicted monopoly, they run under different rules. If you think that's harsh, have a think about what they done.


Overall, don't be surprised if this doesn't work and everyone is not enthusiastic about such a solution.




Already Available
By othercents on 6/28/2006 2:20:52 PM , Rating: 2
Whats funny is most VOIP phone companies already have unified messaging. Even some of the non VOIP phone companies are unified using Outlook and integration into the desktop. This is one of the main selling points of VOIP phone systems. However if Microsoft can open up their software to allow better hooks into the system it will help the industry provide more streamlined unified messaging.

Other




Sounds great for bussiness
By mino on 6/27/2006 9:19:42 PM , Rating: 1
I would be all for it has it not been a company with trac record of microsoft.
This idea is good and welcome in general.
This idea from Microsoft is unacceptable.
Reason: i must be able to TRUST the vendor of such a solution.
I do NOT trust Microsoft.

Gave Microsoft hanfull of chances to prove their worth (hence earn my trust). Every time they let me down sooner or later.

I'm not paranoic nor anarchist. But as soon as I hear that Microsoft has something to do with the thing, my senses tell me to turn "paranoid mainframe admin mode" ON until the danger is dealt with.




I SEE
By jimmy43 on 6/27/06, Rating: 0
"It seems as though my state-funded math degree has failed me. Let the lashings commence." -- DailyTech Editor-in-Chief Kristopher Kubicki

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