New Unified Communications Blog and UC Vision

Hello. I’m Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate Vice President for the Unified Communications Group and I want to welcome you to the new UCG Team Blog. We’re glad that you have taken the time to come visit today and hope you will do so again in the future to gain insight directly from the Product group on our current products and future plans. Future posts on the Blog will focus on technical issues, tips n tricks, feature decisions, training and event opportunities and the occasional fun post on “who we are”. We also want to hear from you, so please let us know your thoughts about our products and unified communications in general by commenting.

Since the creation of the Real Time Collaboration Group back in 2002, I have been excited to work with a talent group of team members dedicated to changing the way businesses and more importantly their employees worked. Our Unified Communications vision came out of the realization that IP based communications could be dramatically better and cheaper than existing communications systems – and that none of the VoIP players in the market were looking at it this way – they were content with simply replacing the RJ-11 (phone) jack with an RJ-45 (Ethernet) jack on the telephone set – thus delivering the same old user experience, same old capabilities and delivering similar or higher TCO. It’s hard to believe that just 3 short years ago we took the first step toward realizing our vision with the release of Live Communications Server 2003. This was followed by the release of LCS 2005 and its Service Pack. The next release, Office Communications Server 2007, will be another huge step in the evolution of our RTC vision with the integration of Voice into the mix. I hope you are as excited about this as we are.

For those of you that may have missed the announcement of our vision around Voice and it’s integration into the OCS 2007 during our Strategy Day on June 26^th, you can watch a recording of it at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=66924.

There was coverage of the event by many news outlets and we received a lot of coverage. You can read up on some of that coverage both good and bad, at the following links.

• Microsoft Unveils Unified Communications Vision, Strategy, Roadmap - Peter Galli, 06-27-2006
  eWeek

• Microsoft's Unified Communications Plan Unveiled - Staff Writer, 06-27-2006
  CIO

• Microsoft outlines broad unified communications strategy - John Fontana, 06-26-2006
  Network World

• Microsoft Wants Your Office Telephone - Robert Guth and Sara Silver, 06-26-2006
  The Wall Street Journal (free subscription required)

• Microsoft Office Comm Server: feature glut, proprietary, pricey, and too Enterprise-centric - Russell Shaw, 06-27-2006
  ZDNet

Again, I want to thank you for visiting today and hope you take the time to come back again to gain a view into our products and to provide your invaluable feedback on how they are meeting your needs.

Finally, if you’d like to know more about me and my work you can visit my bio https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/gurdeep/default.mspx.

Regards,

Gurdeep

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Great News. If your area of Technology Interest lies in this arena then you just have to read this blog....
• Anonymous
  September 07, 2006
  My company, Gold Systems, is one of your Unified Messaging Specialists, and we're a Gold Certified Partner.  We've been live on Exchange 2007 with UM since April and I love it.  I'd never go back to the old system, and I think our customers will feel the same way once they try it.  I can't wait to install OCS!
  
  Terry Gold