OCS as PBX?
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 03:33PM While Office Communications Server 2007 is best-known as a Unified Communications platform, could some enterprises really be considering it as an enterprise phone system?
Some companies are already considering it to be so, and have either ditched their existing PBX or have installed OCS instead of upgrading their current platform. What kinds of enterprises are candidates to use OCS as their PBX? This article outlines the characteristics of companies that may be ready for 100% OCS VoIP, some caveats for them to consider, and an alternative overlay model that eventually retires the PBX.
Business Characteristics
As usual, business drivers should weigh heavily into a technology direction. Enterprises that are mobile, whose employees are not tied to a desk, or don’t have desks at all, are excellent candidates for OCS. This of course is because Microsoft can utilize the PC as the phone. Microsoft has built their voice software to accommodate poor network conditions, so remote workers over a low-speed DSL or cable modem can still experience excellent voice quality. Professional services companies, sales organizations, and technology companies often fit this mold.
Enterprises that have simple telephony needs are more likely to embrace OCS than clients with complex phone systems. Hold, transfer, and conference are no brainers for OCS, and OCS can do slick things like ring your PC and cell phone at once, but it is not an enterprise PBX at this point. If a company uses complicated call routing and contact centers with detailed call queuing and reporting, the PBX will stay. Much like Cisco’s Call Manager, early OCS versions will have missing features that many enterprises need. Microsoft’s partnership with Aspect, an industry leader in software-based contact centers, has the potential to bridge the gap quickly. Only enterprises with sophisticated contact center needs will need Aspect; some basic call routing and decision making can be done in OCS today, and future releases will add the call control features that enterprises require. Also, OCS can make decisions based on presence already, which traditional PBXs have had to back-haul into their existing PBX call routing logic. If you believe that call routing based on presence of users across multiple devices is the future, then OCS is an attractive platform.
Organizations with a single location are much more likely candidates than those with multiple remote offices. Replacing a single PBX with OCS is easier than replacing multiple PBXs from multiple sites. OCS’s dial plan and location-specific configuration are fundamentally capable of linking multiple sites. But at in this release, if local survivability is required, multi-site enterprises would have to essentially deploy a full OCS ‘pool’ at each location where they need survivability.
Most enterprises seem to still have a single link to remote sites, but have most of their applications centralized. If such a company would say ‘email is more critical than voicemail’ or ‘if our link to data center is down, we’ll have bigger issues than voice or voicemail being down too,’ then they in fact could be candidates for OCS at this time.
Cultural Characteristics
Companies whose employees would rather send or receive an email than pick up their telephone are excellent candidates. PC power users tend to use their phones for basic purposes, and don’t find value or care about the added functionality of traditional PBXs.
If your users are more likely to use cell phones than desk phones, then OCS is an easy fit. Cell phones have far fewer functions than do enterprise phone systems, but if users are okay with such limited features, then OCS will more than meet their expectations. And OCS’s design is much more like a cell phone (graphical, with call logs and easy access to contacts) than most enterprise PBX phones.
If your enterprise frequently conducts virtual meetings, either ad-hoc or scheduled, and collaborate remotely via teleconference, video or web conference, then they’ll like appreciate the easy to use and robust conferencing functionality of OCS. Its added function like this that will override some of the missing features that users may notice when compared to their existing phone systems.
IT Characteristics
Companies who have more expertise in Windows and Microsoft applications than in PBXs are excellent candidates. Companies who have antiquated phone systems may not know much about it. Perhaps the phone administrator is no longer with the company, and they’re using a reseller to make changes to it when necessary.
Financial Characteristics
Companies who are paying a significant amount in maintenance to their PBX manufacturer are some of the most interested candidates for OCS. Some of these enterprises already own the Enterprise CAL Suite (eCAL), and will find OCS an even more attractive solution since OCS client licenses are included in that package.
To be continued next week with timing considerations, a quick checklist to see if OCS as PBX is a possible choice for your organization, and alternatives to ditching the PBX.....
Admin
While Office Communications Server 2007 is best-known as a Unified Communications platform, could some enterprises really be considering it as an enterprise phone system? - Continued...
Timing
Many enterprise PBXs are old, out of support, cannot be added to, and have no cost-effective upgrade path. This is a catch 22 for enterprises… they need something new but to add/upgrade to their existing system is so expensive that they now are looking for other options which cost similar of even less money. This is where the leap of faith is occurring in clients that are making the move straight to OCS. They believe in the future of OCS as an enterprise telephony system and are willing to trade off the easy to use and elegant architecture for a fully loaded set of features from a traditional PBX. Timing
Any client looking at replacing their PBX in the next 4 to 24 months should give OCS at least a cursory look if they meet any of these characteristics.
Enterprises that choose OCS will get a truly unified set of voice, video, IM/presence, and conferencing tools. While OCS may not compare to today’s best PBX feature sets, what PBX could compare to OCS’s full intuitive and completely mobile UC experience? Deciding on which direction to head is a tough decision now, but will get easier with each subsequent release of OCS.
Want to see if your enterprise is a likely candidate for 100% OCS VoIP at this time? Take this quick quiz.
| Question/Characteristic | Yes | No | |
| 1. | Is your workforce substantially mobile, and rarely use a desk phone? | ||
| 2. | Is email is more critical than voice or voicemail? | ||
| 3. | Would users rather send or receive an email than pick up their telephone? | ||
| 4. | Does the organization use more cell phones than desk phones? | ||
| 5. | Does your organization have virtual teams that collaborate remotely? | ||
| 6. | Does your IT shop have more Windows and email expertise than voicemail and PBX expertise? | ||
| 7. | Do you own Microsoft’s Enterprise Client Access Suite? | ||
| 8. | Is your PBX nearing the end of its life? | ||
| 9. | Do you have remote sites that must have phone service no matter what? | ||
| 10. | Does your enterprise run its own contact centers? |
If you answered “Yes” to 1-8 and “No” to 9 and 10, then your company is an ideal candidate for 100% OCS VoIP at this time.
An alternative to ditching the PBX:
If an enterprise doesn’t plan on upgrading or buying a new traditional IP PBX but are not yet ready for 100% Office Communications Server VoIP, there are alternatives. The traditional approach is to connect the PBX to OCS through a Microsoft-certified VoIP Gateway, then change the PBX dial plan to send the calls to OCS for the users who are moving to OCS VoIP. However, this requires a change be made to the PBX each time that a user migrates.
If an organization needs some of its users to stay on the PBX but knows that it is headed towards 100% OCS VoIP eventually, there is a more effective migration. Putting a Microsoft-certified VoIP Gateway between the public phone network and the PBX, and having the gateway decide where to send calls (either to OCS or to the PBX). This allows OCS to do the intelligent call control it is capable of for all users, but still allows the PBX to be used for call center users that are unlikely to be satisfied by OCS at this time. This gets both sets of users what they need, and deploys OCS today in a way that makes it easier to power down your PBX later. More about this in the next entry.
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Reader Comments (10)
So Chris, does that mean that an organization where users pick up the phone to call for help when they crash their computer would be a BAD fit for OCS?
Here, here Chris! It is good to see these things in print. The evolution has been obvious for years and I will be happy to see the telephony application living in a world that I can truly understand, design new features and functionality for, and provide ease of entry for reporting purposes.
Chris, I would suggest an approach that is oriented to Unified Communications more than to the PBX. Since UC is "Communications integrated to optimize business processes," UC is usually adopted in work groups and into business processes, not enterprise-wide.
If you look at the question this way, the emphasis on Business Characteristics shifts more to a departmental level or operational process level. This supports the progressive or incremental adoption of OCS as the (only) communications server for specific parts of an enterprise. Since OCS does not yet have (and may never need to have) some elements such as E-911, Call Center, or Operator Console, et al., this UC approach on a workgroup and business process basis, with integration the existing (legacy) PBX where needed for dial plan integration, will allow more effective and rapid OCS adoption.
Since this will deliver the fastest, most economical implementation for most customers and will provide essentially all the payback for the enterprise, the incremental approach, with co-existence where needed, is almost certain to provide the greatest ROI. The massive ROI achieved by Global Crossing with this approach is a great example, visible in the white paper at this URL:
http://www.unicommconsulting.com/library/UC_ROI_Microsoft_OCS2007_mp_dhv_0708.pdf
So, as you work on your next article and checklists, perhaps you could share your ideas of where OCS fits best for UC applications (and ROI) for use in combination with the checklist of the PBX replacement considerations.
By the way, my post on the introduction of Microsoft into the Gartner Enterprise Telephony Magic Quadrant may be of interest, too:
http://blog.ucstrategies.com/index.php/2008/08/12/microsoft-makes-the-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-corporate-telephony-2008/ (may need to copy-paste the URL).
Thanks for opening up this dialog.
Marty Parker
Hi Peter, thanks for replying. MSFT has partnered with LG-Nortel, Polycom, and other phone hardware manufacturers to ease the transition for traditional desk phone users. The core servers can be made redundant so that a single server outage would be a minimal disruption. That said, many folks are getting savvy enough to use cell phones, text messaging, and http://twitter.com in an emergency (and many would agree that having a PC crash is an emergency)!
Thanks for the post Brady. It's going to be an exciting ride for sure. Marty's next post illustrates some of new features/functionality that I'm most excited about seeing developed.
Hey Marty, thanks for sharing. I like your thought process, and agree that OCS is making its entry into workgroups or more specifically, categories of workers (road warriors, for the most part). But as the capability that you describe seeps into the business fabric, then adoption across the enterprise becomes more likely.
This is an interesting discussion and I would like to add a few points that clients discuss with me a to why they are slowly taking this approach.
1. CAC seems to come up a lot although the RT Audio and RT Video codecs MS use are adaptive and work still with packet loss, delay and jitter clients want to reserve the bandwidth so they no exacally how many calls they can make from a site.
2. When OCS R2 is released some of the missing features and functionality will be available, an equivilant of SRST is still missing and is important to enterprise organisations.
Interested in hearing other peoples comments.
Right on Rebel Captain. The Surviable Remote Site Telephony (LSP, etc.) features that other vendors offer is not an option right now, so if enterprises answer "yes" to question #9 "Do you have remote sites that must have phone service no matter what?" then you have to be careful. There is a way to deploy a separate OCS pool at a remote site for complete survivability yet elegant integration with on Active Directory, etc. but for very small branches it's not a small equipment footprint. We've seen some multisite organizations who have two data centers deploy separate OCS pools in each, and have their smaller remote sites split across the two for call control.
I always thought CAC was really cool to talk about, but very rarely saw it implemented correctly. It's a nice feature that data network managers like to rely on to manage their bandwidth, but is anyone really adopting it and coordinating the size of the router queues with the amount of calls allowed?
Yes Rebel Captain,
Absolutely we do CAC and match the output queues on the WAN circuits to the CAC. I install VoIP phone systems for a living. One of the things we do in the planning phase of any VoIP system engagement is determine the QOS requirements on the clients network. We then configure the clients network appropriately. This is absolutely critical.
Do you think people complain when they are not getting email? Wait until they are missing dial tone or are unable to call a remote site.
One of my favorite engagements is following behind someone who hasn't implemented QOS properly. This is usually an easy engagement and resolves a lot of very visible issues very quickly. From our businesses point of view, we quickly gain a new happy and satisifed client.
This new proprieatry adaptive codec is going to make QOS very difficult to implement. I would advise anyone with an enterprise phone system to do their research before flushing their existing phone system and going 100% OCS.
However, I am psyched about it's chat and Presence capabilities. I am very interested in integrating it with some of the other vendors' products.
Brian Bayer
CCIE #14105
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