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Of course you are! For those who are not already aware, Microsoft are attending the upcoming UC Expo in Olympia, London. Brett Johnson, a technical lead in the Microsoft Unified Communications group, will present an early preview of OCS Wave 14 (aka OCS 2010), this session (Wednesday 10th March 11:50 AM – 12:20 PM)  is rumoured to take place “two weeks earlier than the official public beta launch”.

For UC enthusiasts in the UK, I have seen Brett present Exchange and OCS previously and I have no doubt that this will be a show to not be missed – see you there!

Source: here

Previously I mentioned that during the “integrated roadmap” announcement there was continued collaboration with Microsoft technologies, I had mistaken this to mean that the existing agreement (entered back in July 2006 and expected to terminate this July) would continue and possibly renew. However only 2 days since the AvayaN strategy was announced the ICA site (and my case study!) was taken down. This now re-directs to a Microsoft Gold Partner page within the existing Avaya site.

When I asked Avaya for more information on this, the following statement was released:

“The ICA relationship ceased with the Avaya acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions. ICA was based on a four year contract between Nortel and Microsoft that was already scheduled to expire within the year. Avaya has and will continue to work closely with Microsoft to ensure tight integration between our solutions providing customers the greatest flexibility in deploying UC solutions. Current customers with Microsoft OCS integrations with Nortel solutions can continue to utilize their solution as they do today.  Avaya is a Microsoft Gold development partner and has been integrating with Microsoft products across their portfolio for well over a decade – including Windows, Active Directory, Exchange, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Office, CRM, and, of course, OCS and Office Communicator. These integrations are important customer requirements that we are committed to continuing. We understand the somewhat more competitive situation that Microsoft has established, but Avaya has a lot of experience of working with competitors to ensure integration and interoperability to meet our customers’ business needs.
We believe that the combination of Avaya communications with Microsoft OCS and Office products is the most powerful end-to-end solution for Microsoft customers in the market, and are continuing to invest and enhance all our solutions in this area. ”

Shame…but not surprising, especially given the threat that OCS brings to the traditional PABX vendors. I’d imagine it would be unlikely for this agreement to be re-established.

Since the announcement of the iPad and Apple’s new software development kit, VoIP is now permitted over 3G – yay! Previously a hack known as 3Gunrestrictor was used to trick the iPhone into sending illegal data over the 3G network, as expected this was broken regularly by iPhone OS updates.

Applications released to date include:

• Fring
• iCall
• Acrobits

I have already made a Skype-out call via Fring over Vodafone’s 3G network and I can confirm success!

Last night Apple hosted their 2010 media event and as expected a the much hyped new tablet style device was launched, namely the “iPad”. Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs touted the iPad to fill the gap between mobile phone and laptop, but does this requirement really exist?

Personally speaking I find the lack of full Mac OS X makes the device quite unattractive, essentially rendering the iPad as an overgrown iPhone.

Other negatives include:

• No camera
• No Flash
• 10 hours battery life (how can this compete with other e-ink based eBook readers)
• No flash memory slot
• No interchangeable batter (usual Apple story)
• Limited to AppStore applications only
• No hard keyboard (without keyboard dock)
• No multi-tasking

It does however have a microphone, speaker/headset socket and given the recent changes to VoIP over 3G (introduced in Apple’s latest iPhone SDK) it would make for a another piece of kit you could make a call home with! But surely you could just use the iPhone for this purpose?

I have a tablet, with Windows 7/multi-touch I might add, why would I need anything else?

A video preview of the iPad can be seen below.

Deploying OCS definitely delivers cost benefits, R2 specifically offers an in-built conference bridge service – many enterprise spend £1,000’s on managed offerings. Brett Johnson explains how MS UK saved in excess of £3.5 in one year!

Taken from Brett Johnson’s Blog:

I needed to get permission to post this, but now I have, here is our real example of how Office Communications Server R2 (OCS R2) has been deployed in our Dublin data centre and as such, enabling all Microsoft UK employees the capability of reducing travel expenditure as well as our 3rd party conferencing costs but utilising the native capabilities of OCS R2, namely: Live Meeting and Audio Conferencing.

Compelling reading for any case study.

“In Microsoft UK, the Sales & Marketing and Support Group has seen average cost reductions of over 50% in both T&E and Telecoms, generating savings of £3.6m saving year on year (over the period from November 2008 to Oct 2009 compared to the previous 12 months)

· T&E costs savings are 51% T&E (£3.3m)

· Telecom costs savings are 54% Telecoms (£320k)

The cost savings are due to the adoption of Unified Communication and Live Meeting and changes in the travel policy. The travel policy changes resulted in many business meetings being hosted online and therefore business continued as before.”

Source: here