Unified Communications with Microsoft

Unified Communications is dangerous! Like methamphetamine – once you try it, can’t stop thinking about it. My name is Drago and I am addicted to UC! That’s it. I said it!

 When it comes to endpoints, the Great Chinese Wall looks like a sand castle compared to the stubbornness of Microsoft to collaborate with other manufacturers. To some extend I can understand – Telephony is essential part of the Workflow and breaking this element will disrupt or break the Workflow itself. In this regard, having endpoints that perform exactly as expected is important – last thing Microsoft wants is bad name of the platform because of underperforming phones. It is a war out there and the competition will jump on every opportunity to throw mud wherever sticks or not. My gut feeling tells me that Microsoft is (for many people yet to be seen, though) a player in the VoIP market already and despite the big words about interoperability and openness, backstabbing and dirty tricks is (and always will be) part of the corporate voodoo… As we say in my country: “If you don’t want the cat to drink the milk, cover the pan”. And so Microsoft does…

 Yes, we have Tanjay, Catalina, Oak – very well crafted in means of design and performance – no arguments here. When I wrote in previous blog that I have a feeling the developers never left the lab and corporate meetings when working on the OCS phone line, I meant – the disconnect between the concept and reality. As IT person, I look for logical reason behind everything. No, your computer did not decide to show pop-ups on its own – you did something that shouldn’t have beforehand! You phone does not ring because you set “Do Not Disturb” as status, not because “This system sucks”. Even if the common sense justifies the logic of presence and call flow, one cannot imagine the frustration of having to deal with perceptions every day, all day! One manager of department insisted the phones must ring even if the person is off for the day. Another, to have every phone ring with different ring tone, so he can determine who is at his desk – from his office. Come on! I am just a Bulgarian, not a magician!

 If you read this, I am sure by now you already asking yourself “Ok… that is your point?”

 I know our deployment will make a lot of people to roll eyes, and yet it is true – we are using non-certified Snom endpoint. 90% of all phones are Snom300. In 100% OCS EV environment, 11 months already! Not a single PSTN line (except the security systems and the elevators) and I blog about UC, not posting job resume somewhere… because it works. Only with Snom I was able to satisfy some of the weirdest requirements of our Departmental Managers… Everybody that attended a corporate meeting knows the feeling of being a “scapegoat” where all others have “legitimate” reason to off-load their failures and channel it toward “the IT and their VoIP system”. The people hate changes by design (intelligent or not) and the best way to fight this is to have the flexibility to fight back with “OK, you got what you want, now shut up” and believe me, nothing sounds sweeter than when the President say “I don’t want to hear any more The VoIP system does not work. Works for me just fine… live with it”. To get there, however, you need to have the right tools at your disposal…

 My point is – Snom went above and beyond to develop firmware that actually works with OCS. It does have its small problems, which we solve on fly when discovered, and I just dream of a perfect world where Microsoft would partner with them in joint effort to offer greater variety, flexibility and price ranges. After all, we do VoIP not only to satisfy our own vision for the feature, but for down to earth reasons as increased productivity, reduced MRC and last, but not least, fast ROI.

In my next post, I will offer a solution as of now one can use Snom phones to ring it with distinctive ring tone depend of where the call ordinates – PSTN -> OCS or within the organizations.

Ah, the touchy subject… Let me tell you what I think.

Microsoft have the leverage to learn from the best when comes to VoIP. OCS EV proves every day to be a valuable alternative to the Big Boys (and big money) solutions. I know at least one place where Nortel slashed their yearly maintenance fees 60% in desperate attempt to “distract” the College from moving to Microsoft UM and… yet this same college uses Exchange as email solution, OCS as IM solution, SharePoint as collaboration solution and so on. What would be the logical choice for VoIP in this case?

OCS on its way to mature as complete solution and yet Microsoft repeated one more time a common in the past mistake – looked in the mirror and said “yeah, we are the biggest and we know better” when comes to the endpoints. It is so typical in the IT world when one programmer write piece of code and another programmer goes like “Man, this is beautiful!” while for the rest of the world this still looks like Sumerian. I have a feeling the hardware part of OCS never left the corporate presentations until hit the market. You see, EDU sector is different. Say, in Geico, you can give the employee a banana, tell him – “This is how you make a phone call from now on” and that’s it. In EDU, we will form a committee and two focus groups to discuss “Is this a phone and can we use it in our college?”

There are three main objectives during the planning phase:

• To reduce or offset completely the stress when pushing major changes in the work environment
• To complete the deployment with the lowest TCO thus achieving fastest ROI
• To achieve maximum savings of MRC

Back in the days, when I told my boss that we need to place a $500 phone on the desk of an entry clerk that makes less than a $20,000 per year, he sent me to take a drug test and began listen only when I introduced endpoint for less than $80. Besides, Snom 300 series looks like a phone, feels like a phone and works like a phone.

We did some ‘physiological” tests. Catalina devices were introduced to different categories in our college. Needless to say, IT folks absolutely love it; the CIS faculties were OK with it and the rest – “Take this thing away from my desk, now!” When Snom 300 was introduced, all we got is “Ah, I have new phone.” And of course, with Tanjay we got “Can I keep it” and the answer is “No! It is too expensive and you will never use even 10% of the features.”

All our executives have Tanjay not because it looks cool but because it introduces features unseen before. It is simply the ultimate collaboration tool one could have on its desk. Let say the CFO calls branch office Director to discuss a budget request from the Dean. At some point the Director will say – “You know, I see the Dean is available, let’s escalate this call to a conference…” and all this from a phone device. Beautiful!

Down on the floor, all we have is “Georgia Military College, Business Office. How may I help you?”