Tag Archive for 'unified Communications'

The benefits of being online

Published by Ben Kepes on September 2, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, SaaS and Web x.0. 12 Comments

The biggest benefit of SaaS, as I see it, isn’t the fact that it’s available online and anywhere. Rather it’s the added value that connectivity brings.

A great example of what this can mean in practice comes from the Xero update which came out today. Xero now allows a couple of interesting features;

Click to (Skype) call

Unified Communications (UC) is the way of the future. Imagine being able to click to call, to SMS or to Skype from within your application. Xero has gone half way there with the roll out of click to Skype functionality. Of course it only works when the receiving party has Skype - and it’s be nice to see some functionality for IM or traditional calling - but it’s a step very much in the right direction.

contacts-skype

Contact Links

Xero also added the ability to build own custom links to a CRM system directly from within the app.  Users can set up Contact Links under their Organisation settings. Xero has also created a link builder that reportedly makes it easy to match contact fields inside Xero to other systems.

contactlinks

It’s good to see some of the network, and networked effects coming through from Xero - still a long way to go but they’re getting there

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Microsoft - building a room that Echoes….

Published by Ben Kepes on May 31, 2008 in Design, Efficiency, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 1 Comment

So Microsoft has announced its “Echoes” project, a unified communications platform for telcos that, via the windows live service, seeks to;

  • Sync Address book contacts over the air
  • Ensure that IM messages work seamlessly with SMS
  • Windows Live Messenger contacts get local numbers
  • Voice calls from Messenger on PC to mobiles
  • Give some sort of presence verification

Mary Jo got down with some hyperbole, saying that this was an attempt by Microsoft to eliminate phone numbers (in her defence she was direct quoting Bill Gates). Zoli returned with a well reasoned retort saying that Echoes, rather than eliminating phone numbers, simply makes it more convenient for people to use them. He also touched on the fact that these services are already offered (in part or in full) by a number of other players.

And therein lies the rub - for unified communications to be, well unified, it needs to be all inclusive - MS Echoes lock-in plus Skype lock-in plus Grandcentral lock-in does not equal unification by any measure I’m comfortable with.

No what is really needed is for a third party to offer the unification service, achieve buy in from all the various players and look, act and feel neutral.

So, whereto for Echoes? Well it is an MS product, MS have some serious relationships with the telcos so there is every chance that it will work. Whether or not it should of course is another discussion. In any case, and for the current and ex-pat antipodeans out there, I leave you with another Echo - one firmly emanating from the eighties.

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Microsoft’s picture of a unified future…

Published by The Unreasonablemen on March 11, 2008 in Business. 0 Comments

{this is a mirror post of unreasonablemen.net}

And no it has nothing to do with Vista….

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=MbGMN5hTe5w[/youtube]

BUT, it does have everything to do with Microsoft Mesh and MS’s S+S strategy. Gianpaolo from the development team outlines a simple S+S example here.

I love Office 2007, the interface is clean, efficient and now very familiar. Far, far, far superior to any web based productivity tools I tested. The problem of course was collaboration and anywhere access. How do I share documents with others and/or how do I access my docs from anywhere. Now I use Office Live workspaces in conjunction to Office. The combination of the two is very appealing:

I use Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) locally to author a document, presentation or spreadsheet and Office Live workspace in the cloud to collaborate with others and as an anywhere access store.

MS’s view of interconnectedness between offline and online worlds, (on premise and cloud computing) requires some sort of synchronisation. This framework is essential for them to retain their incumbent desktop business while paying homage to the growing movement toward SaaS & into cloud computing.

Couple this with some IP based unified communications elements and you get all the functions depicted in the future piece. I’ve watched that video twice, and possibly like many of you found it to be a little surreal. But have a long think about the elements to achieve that.

Ubiquitous networks, unified communications (yip MS is into Telco, more in this bit), shared workspaces, cloud based storage and fileshare. Not that futuristic really…

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