What happens when 'communications aren't unified'?

There are a number of blogs I follow (via RSS of course) and the new 'blogger on the block' is Maren Bennette who has years of experience in the telecoms industry and has certainly seen and written about many technologies that have come and gone.

The reason I am introducing Maren on my blog is that he recently made a post about a bad experience he recently had when trying to join a conference call which made me smile.

The conference call first started off with confusion over the conference bridge to use and then a mixture of latency,  mobile phones and Skype made things worse.  It took a while but eventually they got there :-)

This post highlights three points for me

1. The technology sometimes doesn't work well when you have a mixture of vendors.  We can try and fix this problem over time but I think this is always going to be an issue.  Making codecs available and opening up the correct APIs helps but its only useful if other vendors want to use them and implement them correctly.  I think we need to make sure software works well with other vendors but not to the detriment offering more/better features and experience on our own stack.

2. Once again,  its apparent to me that we need to make it as simple as possible for people to use technology and this situation is a prime example of technology getting in the way of communication. 

3.  A communications system is only as good as the weakest part.  Someone joining in from a mobile phone or someone not understanding how to use the technology will make even the best system break.

Key learning for me here,  when I speak to Maren on the phone next time I need to make sure its all working perfectly ;-) (I don't think it was a call with me he is referring to by the way)

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I think my point was more that if you it from one vendor it is going to work better together,  which I think would be obvious to most people. That said,  there are times when you might not want or be able to get all you need from one vendor. I think its a matter of UC vendors trying to interoperate while making sure it doesnt affect their ability to continuously develop their own product(s) at their own pace.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2007
  Mark! your number one point is that people should buy all of their technology from Microsoft? You do surprise me Matt