Microsoft Unified Communications & RTC User Group, United Kingdom

So I'm late posting this, apols to all, but Microsoft last week made a major announcement about their UC direction. Rather than repeating the content here you can get all the details at http://www.microsoft.com/uc/default.mspx.

The highlights include the next release of LCS being branded Office Communications Server 2007, RoundTable being offically announced (cool) and Office Communicator embedded onto phones (potential for sub-zero here I think). there also seems to be a quite a lot of telephony fucntionality in OCS which will be interesting to see.

My intial thoughts are it's looking good.. at long last Cisco will have some serious competition in the enterprise IP Telephony space, albeit MSFT and CSCO are coming at from the differant perspectives. My only concern at the moment is that MSFT don't uderestimate the network fucntionality required. Havig worked with IPT since 1999, supporting Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) on the phones and providing the phone with switchports for a PC are both going to be incredibily important.

Re CPD if I recall correctly Mitel have submitted some work to the IETF for a 'standards' based version of CDP, which is effectively a layer 2 discovery protocol. I'm not familiar with the specifics of the Mitel proposal but it would be good to see it, or something similar, adopted industry wide.

It's going to be intersting that's for sure :)
Russ

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Russ Kirk
russ.kirk@GreyConvergence.no.spam.com

Did you watch the presentations all the way through?

I tried to but it was so embarrasingly staged I had to turn it off and thought I'll read the stuff later!

The roundtable did look funky, though it wasn't a usual meeting in the sense that everyone "took their turn" to speak. I wonder what happens when you've got someone who keeps talking over the presenter. When I used to do radio shows we had this bit of kit for doing telephone interviews that allowed us to set the level to which the interviewer could dominate. Hopefully there'll be a similar ability with RT. Also, I'll be interesting to see what it retails for and why they're going to wait till Q2ish next year to launch it... Wonder what is wrong with it that its not ready to go now...

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Mike Jones
Technical Consultant - Compass Hill

Hello,

You Might want to take a look at this posting; it contains links to a few other MS postings concerning the product which should be helpful

http://mucuguk.org/forums/thread/31.aspx

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Arthur Pounder