From Unified Messaging to Unified Communications

According to Microsoft's Zig Sarafin (general manager, Real-Time Collaboration), "In the last year, because we were using Live Meeting and doing more Web conferencing, Microsoft saved about $70 million on travel expenses."

Although savings in a company's travel budget don't necessarily benefit IT budgets, Zig's implication is that if IT could save your company millions of dollars in travel costs this year, you could justify implementing a unified communications (UC) infrastructure. But even if IT could apply other departments' travel-cost savings to new technology, this month's 300 survey respondents say they'd need a better idea of the concepts, technologies, and benefits of UC before considering a UC implementation.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they understood UC concepts and benefits, 29 percent had heard of it but weren't familiar with the concept or benefits, and 13.7 percent didn't know about UC. Even many readers who said they understood UC were uncertain about how it differs from Unified Messaging (UM) and what role (if any) Exchange Server 2007 plays in a UC solution. Many survey respondents asked "What specifically is UC, and how does it save us time and money?"

Expanding on UM
"Often people think UM means UC," Zig said. "In the survey, people said UC meant email and voicemail integration," which is actually the basis for UM. Exchange 2007 Enterprise Edition and Outlook 2007 let you access your voice and email messages from your Inbox. Zig noted, with these products you get "speech-recognition access to calendaring and to your corporate directory. For example, you can call Microsoft's main corporate number, ask for someone, and the voice recognition system will route the call."

Complementing the Exchange-based non-realtime UM platform is Live Communications Server (LCS), the foundation for UC. Zig explained, "To define UC, we start by looking at the different silos of business communications today: audio conferencing, PBX, Instant Messaging, email, voicemail, video, mobile phones. UC is about breaking down those silos into one software experience that works on your PC, on your mobile device, on a telephone in your office. Instead of going to four or five different applications to reach a person, you go to one source of communication. Instead of trying to find a phone number for that person, you type in the name or look at your buddy list and see if they're available. That is the beginning of unified communications."

Like Exchange with Outlook, LCS works with "Office Communicator, which is a unified communications client. Communicator looks like an IM client. But you can also make calls from this client. It's a soft phone. Communicator is the user experience on the PC for Web, video and audio conferencing, making phone calls, doing IM, and being able to look up users based on their availability."

Lighting Up Presence
The concept of availability, or "presence," is important for understanding UC. The exemplar of presence capability is IM: In your IM application, you can see whether a person you want to communicate with is online, busy, or accessible via a mobile device. UC extends this capability by accessing Active Directory (AD) information to provide presence data about all members of your organization for all your communications technologies.

Referring to this month's survey data, Zig said, "I found a bit of irony. On the one hand, survey respondents have an issue with being able to reach people and wish they could know people's availability, or reachability. On the other hand, 65 percent of respondents' companies don't allow people to use IM."

But Zig pointed out, "IM's presence capability hasn't been fully taken advantage of. Today, in the consumer IM experience, I can manually click on ‘busy' or ‘out to lunch.' But that's barely scratching the surface. What's interesting is when people deploy secure IM through LCS, integrated with AD. You can think about presence as ‘lighting up' user identity in a corporation's AD infrastructure. So any application that's integrated with AD can surface up the availability and reachability of someone" in the context of that application.

For instance, Zig said, "If you type in a person's name anywhere in Office, using SmartTag resolution in association with AD, you can see the person's availability. If I'm in my office and typing away, the system knows I'm online. But if I integrate my phone system with presence capability and AD, when I go to a meeting, calendar information from Exchange tells the presence server that I'm not available and puts my phone on Do Not Disturb. That happens because everything is integrated with one source of presence, which is integrated with AD, the core identity system in a company."

Integrating AD with presence has implications for systems management and security. "Surrounding presence," Zig explained, AD provides "context on where users sit organizationally and their role in the company. You can instantiate policies with respect to what group I'm a member of and what rights I have for accessing other people's presence."

So, Zig continued, "From within Outlook 2007, you'll be able to receive an email and instantly respond with an IM. Groups and distribution lists in email are simultaneously supported in IM, so if you want to send a group IM, it's the same group distribution list as you're using in email. It also has implications for cross-network or cross-domain policies around users."

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