Enterprise Voice

A couple of weeks ago I was migrated from using a traditional desktop telephone to Enterprise Voice using Microsoft's Office Communicator 2007.  Microsoft is a big proponent of using its technology and if you are flexible to change this practice of eating one's own dog food can be an exciting way to drive innovation.  I was already really familiar with the cost reasons why it makes sense to implement VOIP; however, I had no idea about the innovation piece. 

At my last position we implemented CISCO's VOIP solution. We had a great Centrex rate with AT&T but was still able to achieve significant cost savings in the first couple of years by implementing it. The users loved it and it made our life administering the phone system much easier. In fact is was one of the most popular projects I've ever done.  Customized ring tones, LCD screens, dynamic soft keys, etc were all great features for making improvements over the existing phone system.  We also implemented unified messaging so our users were able to get all of their voice, email and fax messages in their email inbox.  They could remotely retrieve messages by either phone or PC.   Users could retrieve messages from public computers via OWA.    While this was a great productivity boost for most users it was but not the real innovation changes that I had hoped for.  We were not able to improve collaboration or take advantage of any of the XML capabilities to extend the IP phone system.   We ended up with a voice solution that looked and worked very similar to the old phone system. Even their soft phone looked and worked exactly like their hardware.  That is not what I was looking for in innovation.  

Having worked in IT for so many years I have an appreciation for how much goes on behind the scene to make it look easy, and I'm sure the rollout of Enterprise Voice for the Redmond Campus was no exception, but from an end user's perspective, it was pretty simple.   I got an email about 1 month ago offering me the ability to  “opt-in” to the UC telephony experience.  The sign-up process included choosing either a GN2000 USB Headset and a Polycom CX100 USB Speakerphone or UC Desk Phone and links to install both Office Communicator 2007 and Office Live Meeting 2007.  I chose both the GN2000 and the CX100, installed the software which of course required a reboot.  A week later the devices were delivered via mail to my office, I plugged in the headset and 10 minutes later I was using the UC telephony capabilities.

Now the innovation.  First off, I have nothing that looks like a phone.  The interface is just office communicator.  Anybody who uses instant messaging will feel right at home:

It is integrated with both your outlook schedule as well as telephony, so whenever your schedule shows you busy or you are on the phone your status changes from green to orange.  Hovering over the note icon to the left of the phone displays the out of office notification from outlook:  Pretty cool to know if somebody is available to take your call before calling.   Click on the phone icon located on your contact list and it drops down the various phone numbers available, select one and you're connected. Pretty easy. You also have the option of having a communicator all.   Using the Communicator Search box:
you can look up anybody in the company directory and initiate a call.  You can also just key in a phone number to make a call.  It even translates letters like 1-866-HOTWIRE into numbers on the fly so it makes cutting and pasting numbers easy.  No more having to maintain multiple directories for your data and voice shops!

Click on your phone icon and  you have the option to call forward to another number or ring simultaneous numbers.  You can also set what to do if you don't answer.  In my case voice mail.

The really cool thing is this works great from inside corporate walls of Microsoft.  It worked equally as well in my hotel room using the Sheraton wireless Internet connection in London, England. It worked fine using the public Wi-Fi at the library in Porto, Portugal.  It worked just fine using the Verizon EVDO capability built-in my laptop at the airport.  Basically it worked perfectly anywhere I could get an Internet connection and I mean all the features worked.

Documenting calls and creating records of conversations are easy with the Outlook and OneNote integration.  An entry is automatically created in your conversation history folder in Exchange showing who called, when and for how long the conversation lasted.  While on the call you can easily document the conversation using OneNote integration.

While I've only been a user for a couple of weeks so far I believe unified communications will transform business in the coming decade in the same way e-mail changed the business landscape in the 1990s. 

Tomorrow, I try the live meeting integration.  Let's see if it works as well as telephony.