Unified Communications

What is going to to be the killer app in the unified comminications (UC) world? Is it going to be continuous presence information regardless of the modality, converged voice and video, or something completely different?

Over the years we’ve seen the concept of unified messaging slowly start to be replaced with unified communications. Initally UM was nothing more than voicemail integrating with email. I think almost every manufacturer in the space had a different idea as to just how to skin that particular cat. Some solutions were obviously better than others but most seemed to get the job done. Now, however, the air is starting to get somewhat thinner as truly unified communication options begin to become available. Microsoft, being the 800 pound gorrila in the software world is trying to dominate the market with its OCS (Office Communications Server 2007) platform which obviously integrates pretty seamlessly with the rest of Microsoft’s products, most notably Exchange 2007 and Active Directory. It’s an almost wholly software based solution and uses SIP (see some of my previous articles about that) as its sole mode of transport for voice but it does some really cool stuff with presence that in many ways separates it from everybody else. Having a consistent interface to your communications system via desk phone, mobile phone or PC is a pretty slick trick. The OCS client is virtually identical on each device and provides voice, presence and IM capability quite handliy. The biggest downside to the whole setup is that it takes a whole farm of servers to deploy if you follow Microsoft’s best practices. If you’re a company who doesn’t mind deploying a grand total of about 8 servers to run your communications infrastructure, this may be a good solution for you. Or, if you’re like me, you can set up a test environment with something a bit less elaborate and run a smaller subset of the whole equation to see what you think.

There are some other players getting into the fully unified communications area. ShoreTel for one has some pretty slick tricks in their arsenal. ShoreTel 9 is just around the corner and as a beta tester, all I can say is keep your eyes open for some exciting new features that really expand on an already stellar product.

So, the question I would ask everyone is, what combination of things define unified communications for you?