Enabling Technologies Blog
Maximizing productivity with Unified Communications
There's gold in Those ECAL Hills!
Monday, November 17, 2008 at 09:46AM As a systems integration firm and Microsoft Gold Partner, I continue to be amazed by the astonishing number of organizations who’ve made a major investment in the Microsoft Enterprise CAL Suite and have yet to deploy the software. Included in this suite, are OCS 2007, SharePoint, Exchange 2007, MOM, Forefront, and Windows Rights Management enterprise software. To prove my point, over 19 Million Office Communication 2007 CALS have been sold within the last 12 months. Less than 5% of these licenses have been deployed. When you compare this deployment statistic to purchases of other competitive software solutions (Oracle, SAP, Symantec etc…) it seems incomprehensible these licenses are just collecting dust. Of course, since our company has a laser focus on messaging and unified communications, we have a bias and a desire to see clients begin deployment of MS Exchange 2007 and Office Communication Server 2007 with a greater sense of urgency. It appears such a waste of IT dollars to ignore the value of this software investment. Moreover, once you use the software applications in your own business environment, you gain an intrinsic appreciation on how they enrich the communications and collaboration within your company. As with the Internet, you wonder how you ever did without Unified Communications once you begin to exploit its value.
As I see it, the time is NOW to begin deploying these licenses and start reaping the benefits they can achieve. Since we’ve become such a virtual and mobile workforce, the need for real-time communications and collaboration is essential in order to remain competitive. Given the current economic slowdown and worldwide recession, organizations must focus their attention on where to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and boost worker productivity to survive. Yet even today, many organizations fail to recognize the gold in those Enterprise CALS they purchased from Microsoft. You wonder how many of those IT decision makers will still be employed a year from now if they continue to ignore the need to implement a coherent UC strategy for their enterprise. For those forward thinking managers who’ve decided to harness the benefits of their Enterprise CALS investment and specifically UC software, they’ve begun to remove collaboration obstacles and complexity to communication within the enterprise. For them, they’ve begun to remove the pain and frustration for their users and position their organization to maintain a competitive edge despite these challenging economic times.
The gold is being mined through the use of IM Presence and Federation empowering companies to communicate and collaborate more effectively within the enterprise, as well as, with customers and suppliers. Collaboration in a dynamic environment enables more effective teaming, resulting in better decision making and getting products and services to market more rapidly. The hard dollar savings are more quantifiable when leveraging the benefits of audio/video conferencing. With bandwidth costs dropping dramatically in recent years, organizations are realizing significant savings in audio and video conferencing. The dramatic rise in travel costs in 2008 coupled with the loss of productivity for workers forced to travel, makes web/ video conferencing a “no brainer” for forward thinking companies. Organizations gain a justifiable payback and have accelerated their ROI models by leveraging their UC software license investment within months. Facing a grim economic forecast for CY 2009, it is even more imperative and urgent for IT departments and business line managers to begin to take advantage of their ECAL investment.
Over the coming weeks, I will be reporting on whether this trend is changing due to economic and competitive factors that are forcing enterprises to rethink their strategy for ignoring the power of Unified Communications for their workers. Moreover, I will be able to share real life instances on how organizations are mining the gold from their UC license investment through aggressive Microsoft incentive programs to stimulate deployments of R2 for Office Communication Server 2007.
“Microsoft and Mythology” My thoughts on how Microsoft could best position OCS Voice in the marketplace.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 11:46AM In 2000, I was employed as a Data Sales Specialist at Lucent which subsequently spun-off to Avaya. Ignorant at the time, I had the fortune of being at the epicenter of a seismic shift in the telephony world. This was the very beginning of the movement from the TDM to IP-based world of telephony. Coinciding with this movement was Cisco’s initial foray into this nascent market. Seeking to feed its ever voracious appetite for new revenue streams, Cisco set its sights on dominating the enterprise telephony market. They would tout IP-transport as a way of legitimizing their presence in this space. So the logic went: IP-transport is the new way for telephony, Cisco owns IP-transport in the enterprise; therefore, one can only conclude that Cisco is the best choice for your new telephone platform. Lucent represented the old world of telephony with a dominant market-share in the TDM-based enterprise market. Cisco was coming to eat our market-share and the slick, marketing-machine it represented caused a considerable amount of angst within Lucent, by this time re-badged Avaya.
In 2001, now jokingly demoted to an Avaya Territory Rep, I spent the next five years battling Cisco for IP Telephony dominance in the heart of downtown Chicago. I witnessed, first-hand, some of the mistakes that Cisco made in the ensuing years, mistakes that Microsoft could learn from in their quest for a place in the enterprise PBX market.
1. Telephony ain’t easy – If I only had a nickel for every time I heard the terms, “It’s just dial-tone” or “It’s just another application on the network”. That dial-tone is considered a god-given right to users and it is not easy to replicate the so-called 99.999% (aka five-9’s) reliability achieved in the traditional TDM world. That application on the network is real-time and demands a steady packet-stream unlike typical data apps. This is something that the Data folks always underestimated. Users are conditioned to Data apps being down. They don’t view telephony in the same way. Cisco learned this lesson the hard way with shaky technology to start. The rumors of botched installs, helped along by FUD from people like me, propagated and subsequent potential customer shied away from it. It became even more difficult as customers within the same industries shared their stories. Over time, Cisco developed a more reliable and feature-rich solution that overcame some of these issues.
2. Know your audience and take a humble approach – Just because a company believes it is a good idea to enter a market doesn’t necessarily mean that customers will embrace you with open arms. At times, customers perceived Cisco to be arrogant and aggressive. They called the TDM-based PBX a dinosaur and demanded it be replaced. This served to aggravate many a telecom manager that regarded Cisco with suspicion in the first place. Cisco talked about architecture and speeds/feeds. Telecom managers wanted to talk about esoteric phone features and call routing. Data and Voice appeared to be on two separate wavelengths. In later years, Cisco recognized this issue and put on a friendlier face by hiring a slew of traditional telecom folks. Today, the Cisco office in Chicago looks like an Avaya reunion.
3. Rip-and-replace is not an ideal strategy – Up to now, Cisco had dominated every market they had entered with relative ease. Cisco learned that hard way that getting customers to rip out their PBX’s wasn’t going to be easy. They eventually learned that a more migratory approach was effective by leveraging their existing strengths. Cisco owns the router market. Almost every customer has Cisco routers at each physical location. By shipping ‘voice-enabled’ routers on the Edge and making it cheap to turn on that call processing, Cisco could grab those small offices on the Edge and work its way inward. This allowed customers time to play with the technology in a low-risk environment as few users would be impacted in an adverse situation. Cisco could have kept quiet and started to ship those ‘voice-enabled’ routers. Once adequately seeded in the market, they could have started to offer that Edge telephone solution. At the same time, they didn’t have to advertise any grand telephony strategy. Once the Edge started to proliferate, they could work their way toward the Core and the eventual PBX replacement.
I believe that Microsoft can learn from the above lessons. To paraphrase George Santayana , “Those who don’t learn from history’s mistakes are condemned to repeat them.” Cisco has provided a playbook on what not to do.
The question is whether Microsoft has the foresight to pick up the cues. What follows are some of my suggestions:
1. Be patient. Sometimes moving too quickly into a market, especially when not ready, can do more harm than good. Microsoft needs to work on its own timetable. They have the luxury of a massive war-chest to do this right. It will take some time before customers can see Microsoft as a potential provider of their telecom needs. In addition, it will take Microsoft time to build the internal infrastructure, like people and offerings, that will be needed to tackle the market. For example, how will Microsoft provide adequate post-installation support in an OCS Voice solution?
2. Sell the Trojan Horse. This is where the title to my little rant comes in. Just like the Greeks offering their little tribute to the unwitting Trojans, Microsoft could place their own ‘Trojan Horse’ in front of unsuspecting Telecom Managers. The strategy is utilizing a feature in OCS called Remote Call-Control (RCC). RCC allows a legacy PBX to be tied to OCS. The client portion of OCS, call Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC) handles Call Control and the Legacy PBX still provides the dial-tone or Voice portion of the call. Customers already want OCS for IM/Presence. Microsoft can sell integration to the PBX for showing Off-Hook Presence. Off-Hook Presence is a feature in OCS that turns the MOC ‘jellybean’ from green to red when a user is on his legacy PBX phone. In my mind, a desirable feature today. Since this integration is already enabled, one could sell the value of customer’s trialing RCC without feeling threatened by PBX replacement. The users will already be using the MOC for IM/Presence. If they can control their PBX phone via the MOC, this gives them the desktop experience of Microsoft Telephony. RCC gives Microsoft the chance to place OCS next to every core-PBX and co-opt the user experience. This provides an elegant migration strategy to the customer.
3. Sell the Desktop. The Desktop provides a key advantage that Microsoft can leverage in their efforts to enter this space. When I sold at Avaya, we continuously fell into the trap of selling to Cisco’s strength. Cisco and the Data folks love to talk architecture and speeds/feeds. I became adept at white-boarding and illustrating how our architecture was more elegant, superior etc. This was a huge mistake. Microsoft doesn’t need to fall into that trap because they have the greatest weapon of all. The Desktop experience is where users can ultimately measure the value of an application. Microsoft’s ownership of the desktop gives them a tremendous advantage that nobody else enjoys. For example, populating Presence information in Clients outside of the MOC such as Sharepoint, MS CRM and Outlook is quite compelling to customers that already own those other applications. I guess the more pertinent question is who doesn’t own Exchange and Sharepoint today? This inter-application Presence gives customers an impetus to buy OCS for IM. Having that MOC Client serve as your softphone, since you are already using it for IM/Presence, is just an extension of that logic. This allows Microsoft to turn the tables on Cisco and sell their value from a different angle. Where does Cisco have a commanding presence on the desktop? One could argue, the Phone. Unfortunately, the phone, in most cases, is not an application that sits on the PC.
The above assumptions are taken from the functionality residing in OCS R1. At the time of this writing, Microsoft plans to release OCS R2 in February 2009. I believe their plans to truly compete head-on in the telephony market will coincide with the release of OCS R3 which should be delivered sometime in 2010.
I will opine on Microsoft’s progress to date in a later article so please stay tuned...
OCS R2 Attendant
Monday, October 20, 2008 at 10:15AM Jamie Stark who is a Microsoft Technical Product Manager looking after the voice infrastructure portion of OCS was interviewed by TechNet Edge recently. He gives an excellent demo of the new attendant and delegation functionality provided by OCS R2.
Check out the interview at http://edge.technet.com/Media/OCS-and-the-new-Attendant/
The new attendant console application brings together the extended presence functionality within Communicator with the ability to transfer and mange calls in a flexible and user friendly fashion. With extended presence it allows an attendant or secretary to see immediately the status and availability of people within the organisation and give effective feedback to the caller. As a first attempt at a console it appears to offer some good functionality. However until we implement in a heavily loaded system we have yet to see if the interface and OCS can provide an effective alternative to the traditional PBX console.
Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS) R2. Announcement
Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 01:14PM Microsoft officially announced Office Communications Server 2007 R2 today October 14 at VoiceCon in Amsterdam. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-14OCSR2PR.mspx
Key points from the announcement:
• Availability February 2009
• Worldwide Launch Event February 3 2009.
Next-Generation Collaboration
• Dial-in audio conferencing. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 enables businesses to eliminate costly audio conferencing services with an on-premise audio conferencing bridge that is managed by IT as part of the overall communications infrastructure.
• Desktop sharing. This feature enables users to seamlessly share their desktop, initiate audio communications and collaborate with others outside the organization on PC, Macintosh or Linux platforms through a Web-based interface.
• Persistent group chat. This enables geographically dispersed teams to collaborate with each other by participating in topic-based discussions that persist over time. This application provides users with a list of all available chat rooms and topics, periodically archives discussions in an XML file format that meets compliance regulations, provides tools to search the entire history of discussion on a given topic, and offers filters and alerts to notify someone of new posts or topics on a particular topic.
Enhanced Voice and Mobility
• Attendant console and delegation. This allows receptionists, team secretaries and others to manage calls and conferences on behalf of other users, set up workflows to route calls, and manage higher volumes of incoming communications through a software-based interface.
• Session Initiation Protocol trunking. This feature enables businesses to reduce costs by setting up a direct VoIP connection between an Internet telephony service provider and Office Communicator 2007 without requiring on-premise gateways.
• Response group. A workflow design application manages incoming calls based on user-configured rules (e.g., round-robin, longest idle, simultaneous), providing a simple-to-use basic engine for call treatment, routing and queuing.
• Mobility and single-number reach. This extends Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile functionality to Nokia S40, Motorola RAZR, Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms, allowing users to communicate using presence, IM and voice as an extension of their PBX from a unified client.*
New Developer Tools for Business Applications
• APIs and Visual Studio integration. This improves the efficiency of everyday business processes by enabling businesses to build communications-enabled applications and embed communications into business applications.
An Office Communications Server 2007 R2 road shows will be held in Zurich (Dec. 8–9), and Madrid and Rome (Dec. 11–12).
This release meets a number of the key criticisms of OCS 2007 in particular the Attendant console and delegation allows the use of Enterprise Voice by executives while still maintain some of the control they are used to with their current PBXs.
Look out for more blog articles on R2 and what it means to you.
The Ultimate UC Experience: Office Communications Server Integrated with Avaya Communication Manager
Friday, October 10, 2008 at 03:44PM Unified Communications relies on open standards to deliver its promise of simplifying communications, improving productivity, and bringing the information worker closer to the frontline of the enterprise. No better enabler of UC’s promise can be found than with the integration of Avaya Communication Manager with Microsoft Office Communications Server.
Avaya Communication Manager is the flagship IP PBX that handles enterprise IP telephony and contact center routing. Office Communications Server is Microsoft’s collaboration suite, enabling Instant Messaging, presence, web, video, audio conferencing, and voice calling. For enterprises that want the best of both worlds, these two platforms can be integrated via open standards.
Avaya and Microsoft have partnered to develop a tight integration between an existing Avaya Communication Manager environment and a new OCS environment. It allows Microsoft Office Communicator clients to ‘click to communicate’ and otherwise control calls on their Avaya desk phone, seamlessly, from their PC desktop. It also provides advanced presence, displaying the phone’s on-hook/off-hook status on OCS users’ buddy lists. This integration really delivers the sizzle of UC.
This article outlines the elegant way in which OCS can integrate to Avaya Communication Manager, describes the user experience, shows a reference architecture, and outlines the benefits.
Realizing the Promise of UC
The true promise of UC can be delivered with what Microsoft calls “Remote Call Control.” Here, users of the Communicator client can invoke communications and control the physical Avaya phone on their desk from their PC. While this has been done for years with TAPI and other CTI applications, the added value is that now a user’s presence status includes information about whether or not they’re on the phone. This should eliminate (or at least drastically reduce) the need to start Instant Messages by saying “can i call you?” If your buddy’s status is ‘In a Call,’ you can save the keystrokes and get right onto the message (“I just won the contract” or “call me ASAP when you’re done.”)
The main productivity improvement of the advanced UC integration is advanced presence. Advanced presence takes information from not only the PC and keyboard, but also from the users’ on-hook/off-hook phone status. Without advanced presence, isolated IM and telephony tools can actually do more harm than good, and more disrupting than unifying. With the advanced integration, “can I call you” need no longer be answered with, “no I’m on the phone.”
In this case, the Communication Manager and OCS environments are tightly linked with an intermediary gateway, Avaya’s Application Enablement Server (AES). AES is the development platform and open-standards way for third-party applications, like OCS, to take control of Communication Manager phones.
OCS call control is based on an Ecma technical report, TR/87 (also known as CSTA over SIP). CSTA standardizes a set of application services to observe and control voice and non-voice media calls. OCS creates call control messages using CSTA, and then embeds them within SIP payloads. Conveniently, AES has the capability to understand CSTA, along with other telephony integration standards.
When a user clicks-to-call from MOC, AES receives the CSTA message and translates it into something Communication Manager (which has no native CSTA code), can understand. The Avaya phone’s speakerphone on their desktop goes active and ringtone is heard as Avaya Communication Manager makes the outbound call.
How does this call flow specifically work? Here’s an example of a simple inbound call destined for an OCS user with an Avaya phone at their desk.
1. Call comes into Communication Manager from an outside trunk
2. Avaya Communication Manager sends signaling information to AES over the IP network
3. AES sends signaling information to OCS Front-end Server
4. Call simultaneously rings Communicator and Avaya phone
5. If user clicks ‘Answer Call’ on Communicator, Avaya speakerphone or headset goes off-hook. If call is picked up on Avaya phone, ‘conversation’ begins on Communicator
6. Call can be transferred, put on hold, etc. from either Communicator or Avaya phone
7. Media stream is always between Avaya Gxx0 Gateway and Avaya phone
8. Call can be terminated from either phone or Communicator
9. If there were no answer, Call is forwarded to the coverage path for Voicemail
It is most amazing to see this interaction in person, but using Avaya IP Softphone’s ‘picture of phone’ tool, it is possible to picture what happens. The activity is depicted in Figure 2 below. When a call is in progress, you can see that the red call appearance lamp lights up on the Avaya phone, and the Communicator client status button appears red, for “In a Call.” The counters appear and begin to count up. Both devices’ call control icons become active.
Figure 1: Avaya Phone goes off hook when Communicator makes a call.
This advanced integration offers more than just click-to-call and advanced presence. Office Communicator’s phone icons can be used to control many features of the Avaya phone. Click hold, and the Avaya Communication Manager puts the call on hold and lights the hold lamp on the Avaya phone. Click transfer on Communicator and type in a new number or contact, and the Avaya phone transfers the call. Note that due to the way OCS starts its own multi-party audio-conferences, it is not possible to use Communicator to create three-way conferences on the Avaya phone. Conference calls have to be invoked from the Avaya phone itself.
The only data passed between the Microsoft and Avaya cloud is signaling; the front-end server (OCS’s SIP registrar) communicates to the AES, which converts TR87/SIP (CSTA) into the call control language that Avaya Communication Manager can understand. Voice traffic is all between Avaya endpoints and their affiliated media interfaces in the Avaya gateway.
AES 4.1 is required for OCS click-to-call integration, and AES 4.1 requires Avaya Communication Manager 3.0. AES requires the Unified Desktop license, for which the price is based on Avaya’s nine-tier model. While more expensive to implement, this integration gives users the ‘as advertised’ functionality of enterprise-class UC.
Summary:
From a market perspective, all parties involved can be happy with such an advanced integration. IT organizations can provide productivity-enhancing tools to integrate technology that they would otherwise run in silos. Microsoft and Avaya get to deploy their latest showcase integration and receiving commensurate licensing revenue. Systems integrators get contracts for what is not a trivial integration. But most importantly, users can begin experiencing what the UC hype is really all about.