OCS 2007 week 1 - It gets better and better

On Monday of this week I was put on the OCS2007 pilot - I have been using Presence and IM but this gave me the full Voice and Video experience also.

It is absolutely awesome and I can honestly say that I have not picked up a conventional desktop phone at work since.

The transition has been very easy and I am loving every minute of it, but I really put this to the test earlier this week.

I am a great believer in demoing the products live and so if you ask me to present I have one pre-requisite - the Internet.

This Tuesday I was at a hotel presenting. The hotel duly proceeded to supply an internet connection - basically it was the normal affair of 24 hrs access for a set sum - there is no Quality of Service and bandwidth is the usual ADSL.

So I proceeded to demo - first I IM'd Mark at TVP and escalated to a voice call all over the internet, the quality was brilliant we then conferenced in John ( Dragged and dropped into the communicator window) - three way conference over the internet ( and John was working from Home). Finally this was escalated to a video call - again three way.

It is difficult to describe the reaction of the audience but they loved it.

The point I am trying to get across is that this kind of working and unified communication is available to everyone. It is a testament to the technology and OCS 2007. It shows that communication via voice\video and IM is achievable anywhere.

So that was just one highlight of the week using this - but having the ability to check someone's presence in any Office application and choose click to call is great - I used to hate having to read numbers out of my contacts list and dial them into the phone - it normally just resulted in wrong numbers or having to dial again as I was not quick enough to get all the numbers in before the dead tone. This has all gone away.

Working at home has got much better also - I have a standard 2mb adsl connection - the mobile reception where I am is poor ( I live in a big dip) so by being able to now do all my calls from my laptop is great.

The devices that help me do this are great also - I have been lucky enough to test quite a few and my first impressions are very positive I will blog more later.

Like I said at the start - I have not used a conventional desktop phone for over a week and hopefully it will remain that way.

This is the new way of working - find out more at www.microsoft.com/uc

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  This week, I unplugged the telephone on my desk and put it on the other pile of stuff on my desk that