Microsoft goes for unified communications

Along with the paperless office, the idea of Unified
Communications has always been one of those lovely concepts that has stayed
just that - a concept. Apart from the companies trying to sell it, this has
been a blessed relief to the rest of us. Now that's likely
to change, and it's also going to change desktop search.

If you’ve not heard of Unified Comms, or if the memory of it is so traumatic
your mind has blanked it out, it’s basically the idea of getting all of your
communications - voicemail, email, calendaring and the rest - on one device, be
it a PC, land line phone or mobile. Each vendor wanted you to use it’s platform
- be it a mobile (Nokia), landline (Lucent) or monolithic, paleolithic groupware (Lotus
Notes).

The big change over the past few years has been Microsoft’s increasing interest
in using Internet Protocol for voice communications. IP telephony is hardly
new, but it has now reached a point where it is becoming a mainstream product, something that organisations buy almost as a matter of course when choosing a phone system for a new office or building. Add to that increasing amounts of cheap storage that can be accessed easily, and UC is looking less horrible than it did before.

This adds a lot more information to office systems. Where voice mail, for example, was stored away in the phone system, managed by users themselves and rarely retained for more than a few hours after listening, now it can be as straightforward to manage - in theory - as email. There is, of course, one slight fly in the ointment. While machines are good at reading and classifying text, the spoken word is a little different. On top of that, Unified Communications is still the equivalent of wearing socks and sandals.

Let's see if Jeff Raikes' prediction at Voicecon of 100m desktop VoIP users in three years actually bears out. As Gartner analyst Steve Blood points out, there are currently 100m Exchange users, so Microsoft is going to have its work cut out. One last thing; it appears that Microsoft has fallen into the trap of every vendor that has tried to go for unified messaging vendor - tying the messaging to their 'home' platform -  in this case, the desktop OS and productivity suite.