A short break from the UC Case Study to share a tip regarding Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC), the OCS client. One of the things I thought was missing from MOC was the ability to appear offline. This is yet another level of presence where you can initiate conversations but generally people will leave you alone as you seem to be offline. It's a little different than DND, do not disturb. Sometimes you just don't want anyone to know you're there. :p Read more
Welcome back from the holiday! After my intro post last week this is part two and will be focused on Cisco's unified communications offering. Why Cisco, well, they have the most disjointed and incomplete offering currently, but they also have a lot of potential. Read on for some interesting things to think about. Read more
A lot has played out in the UC world over the last couple months and I think it's time to revisit the question of "What is UC?" and dive a little deeper. In this series of posts I'll analyze what functional components make up a UC solution and examine offerings from IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and others. Read more
I had a great opportunity to sit down with Fred Knight at VoiceCon San Francisco this week. In case you don't know Fred, he's the man behind VoiceCon and publisher of NoJitter. Here's what he had to say about VoiceCon San Francisco this year. Read more
Next week is VoiceCon SF 2008 but some vendors are looking to get an early start with the press releases. AudioCodes, probably best known for their UC media gateways, made a major announcement around HD Voice solutions; 2 actually. Read more
Mark Evans at All About Nortel asks Did Microsoft Go Wrong in their choice to partner with Nortel as a voice/pbx partner? The short answer, in my opinion, is no. Nortel has been a great partner and helped Microsoft get its foot in the door in the voice world. The relationship was invaluable in gaining credibility and entrance to Nortel's large installed base. You'll notice I'm speaking solely in the past tense, here's why... Read more
Google announced on the Google blog this morning that they're dropping the deal with Yahoo. Instead of standing up to government antitrust scrutiny, they've chosen to simply walk away. Personally I think they'll wait for a "friendlier" government and try again next year; after all they've been calling Obama "the Google president" internally for months. However, let's pretend for a second that doesn't happen. Read more
I have been mulling over an interesting idea since the first Windows Azure announcement at Microsoft PDC: AD Federation to the cloud. This is the holy grail of cloud computing! The biggest problem I've seen in enterprise cloud computing adoption is the ability to seamlessly integrate enterprise on-premise applications and cloud apps. No one wants to maintain two sets of credentials, two sets of everything really just to work internally and in the cloud. Microsoft's announcement that they will let users federate their enterprise AD with the Azure platform is HUGE. Read more
Yesterday Mike Nash announced the official name for "Codename: Windows 7" on the Vista team blog... Wait for it... Windows 7!!! Read more
As per the Vista team blog, Microsoft announced that attendees to the Microsoft PDC conference in October will recieve an advance preview copy of Windows 7 on a USB drive. This is a great opportunity for developers to get a jumpstart on Windows 7.
Some of us more infrastructure-oriented types might want to check out PDC for this opportunity as well. Microsoft has been very tight-lipped on Windows 7 and any rumor blog or screenshots I've heard about have been taken down almost immediately. I know I may be in the minority, but I think it's the right thing to so. If it were ready for public consumption then it would be out there. Especially with the anti-vista sentiment, despite the Windows mojave project, and the general enterprise sentiment of "We'll wait for Windows 7" keeping it under wraps until it's "ready" benefits everyone. I believe Microsoft will release a solid, "ready for market" product with Windows 7.
Check out the PDC site to sign up - http://www.microsoftpdc.com/
PCWorld has been pretty good at collating rumors lately and has the definitive Windows 7 post here. Be sure to check out the latest NetworkWorld article on Windows 7 from John Fontana as well
Before anyone asks, I know nothing of Windows 7 except what's been explicitly posted on an official Microsoft site. I have thoughts and conjectures just like everyone else. Feel free to post yours below. :)
According to Greg Keizer's article at ComputerWorld not only is Google Chrome usage not growing but it's now shrinking. "At the end of its third week of availability, Google Inc.'s Chrome accounted for 0.77% of the browsers that visited the 40,000 sites tracked by Net Applications, down from a 0.85% share the week before."
Chrome had a high just above 1% but appears to be disappearing just and quickly as it first appeared. The various theories on Chrome's ultimate goal are really interesting and people seem to have put a lot of thought into them, but none of them work if no one uses Chrome. It was an interesting idea and I think the concept was strong but it might just be too early for the cloud-only model Chrome was trying to push.
Steven J. Vaughn-Nicols wrote a great article on why he thinks Chrome just isn't ready... yet. And Royal Pingdom asked why does it seem like all Google products are always in beta? Support costs are a huge impact. Google escapes the support costs, and the PR nightmare of releasing an otherwise buggy product by calling it "beta". Google, we're calling you out. You're one of the big boys now. Stop pushing beta software and push product! Real, RTM-worthy product.
There's a lot of buzz about Cisco's acquisition of Jabber and before that, PostPath. John Furrier says it's "getting interesting" but most of the discussion I've heard is how Cisco will remain a non-starter in rich UC. Bar none, Cisco makes a great VoIP platform with their CallManager platform. However VoIP does not a UC platform make. They now have all the pieces, email (PostPath), IM (Jabber), VoIP/UM (CallManager) but they lack the glue.
It's impossible to overstress the importance of "unified" in unified communications. Microsoft's Gurdeep Singh Pall adds
Cisco’s offering is the definition of “un-unified” communications. With more than 40 products, their solution is a patchwork of technologies and networking. The risk for customers is that a patchwork system is slower to roll out, harder to train users, and more expensive to manage and maintain over the long term.
He has an obvious vested interest but you can't ignore that he makes a good point. No one wants to roll out 40 different independent platforms, or even 3-4. The whole point of UC is a single console and a single user experience across multiple modes of communication all tied together with a presence engine.
Cisco has proven they don't have the software expertise to bring it all together as Brian Riggs notes in his evaluation of their current IM solution, Read more
VMWare demo'd a new version of their VI Toolkit for managing VMs at VMWorld. VI Toolkit 1.0 has been out for awhile, but the new 1.5 version has a few more tricks up its sleeve. According to Carter Shanklin (through CNet) administrators can adjust the configuration of some applications through the toolkit API. For example, "[it] could be used to adjust the configuration of a virtual machine running Microsoft Exchange. In the demonstration, the Exchange server virtual machine was upgraded from 1GB to 4GB of RAM without a reboot." Note that hot-adding memory is a function of Windows Server 2008.
This opens up a world of possibilities for the virtualized datacenter. One of the headaches in a virtualized environment is that in a lot of ways you still have to manage servers independently. The new version of the VI toolkit has the possibility to adjust many things in an environment from a single console. With the ability to build PowerShell cmdlets administrators could automate many tasks to a single button click.
It's not hard to see where this is going. I'm excited! I think the next 3-5 years will be very interesting in the virtualization world.
One commenter on the official Microsoft Vista blog noted "I found myself waiting to get the message". And that, my friends, is exactly the point! The blogosphere and even mainstream media is abuzz about the new Microsoft ads. Where are they going? What's the point? Why? Why ask why? I don't remember the last time people were buzzing this much about Microsoft! Read more
There's been much hullabaloo (I always wanted to use that in a sentence) about Chrome being "the next OS" and a challenge to Windows on the desktop. One idea is that it could be the "boot to browser" launching pad into the Google ecosystem of cloud-based applications however, as I noted before I see this being a bit of a niche market and nowhere in the Enterprise. Microsoft needed to respond if for no other reason than to quell the buzz. Matt Asay notes they preempted Chrome with the latest release of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007).
From Matt's "The Open Road": Read more
Just a short note on Google Chrome. I downloaded it today to try it out. I had not idea how hard that would be. The download was easy but it doesn't seem to work with a lot of webpages. Most importantly for me if you try to visit Outlook Web Access the Exchange 2007 CAS server will force you into downlevel "OWA Light". Any browser I use absolutely must support the full functionality of OWA. Maybe I shouldn't have had such high expectations from a beta product but I expected more from Google given all the hype. Read more
John Furrier was way out in front of the Google Chrome story. What's Chrome you ask? Google will announce tomorrow they are coming out with a new browser called "Chrome". The feature list looks a lot like IE7 and IE8 with a sprinkling of Firefox. And the kicker, supposedly it will be 100% open source. Read more
I know this is a Cisco focused story, however this is at least peripherally Microsoft related. I follow the unified communications market closely and am a big fan of Microsoft's Office Communications Server product. However, Cisco is one of few companies with the R&D capital and chutzpah to challenge Microsofts place atop the throne. Read more
Rui Silva posted an article, part 1 of 2, on "12 Tips to Optimize an Exchange 2007 Infrastructure". Reading through them they may seem like common sense but they're a good reminder of best practices. There are also some performance tweaks I'll bet are new to all but the most hardcore geeks. In a busy IT world filled with firefighting sometimes a little proactive work can go a long way. You'll have to check out Rui's post for the details but here's a list of the first 6 tips: Read more
Alex Lewis has been involved in the high tech industry for more than 15 years, from satellite antenna design to to executive IT management. He has been a co-author or contributing author for books on Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, Windows 2003 R2 and Microsoft Technical Specialist Exam Guides. Alex is a senior consultant at Convergent Computing, an IT consulting firm specializing in Microsoft technologies. Alex is involved in many early adopter and TAP programs, working with new technology often 2-3 years before public release. Alex is also a CISSP and leads Convergent's Security and Unified Messaging practices in the field.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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