“I’m not just the President of….”

Do you remember those commercials where the guy would get on and say: “I’m not just the President of……, I’m also a client”? Well, I had one of those experiences the other day and if this doesn’t convince you of the value of Unified Communications; nothing will!

I live down in Charlotte, North Carolina and we’ve had so much rain lately that sales of Arks have been going through the roof! The other day a tree got weighed down by the rain and took out the power to my complex. Of course this happened while I was in the shower and getting ready to do a remote installation of a Mediation server and Media Gateway. The installation was due to start 40 minutes after the power went out. I realized I had to let the customer know of my predicament as well as some folks back at the home office. I got out of the shower and got to work:

1. My laptop was running on it’s battery so I attached and loaded up my broadband card and got connectivity. I then looked up the customer’s phone number and called him through the Office Communicator client. Of course, my Tanjay was out of action! I then called our Project Manager and the CTO to let them know of my predicament. I then created a note in Communicator and set my status to “Be Right Back”.

2. I hung up the broadband connection and packed up my papers, laptop, headset, power supply, and just in case, a power strip and headed to the local Starbucks(I brought the power strip because I didn’t know how extensive the power failure was and I figured there would be other folks with the same idea rushing over there! I figured outlets would be at a premium).

3. Once there, I was able to plug in, power up and get connected to their WiFi. I plugged in my headset and I was good to go!

There was one flaw to my plan! My local Starbucks is adjacent to a High School and that day, Murphy’s Law was reigning…..it was the last day of finals! I ended up sitting next to the bar and there was a din of noise for several hours.

Thanks to a decent headset and our using Office Communications Server 2007 R2 my customer and I had absolutely no problem hearing each other. He said he could hear some background noise but it didn’t affect his ability to hear me clearly! While I was working with him we had a Live Meeting going with him sharing his desktop running remote desktop to another device and I was talking to him via Enterprise Voice on my Communicator client! My cell phone was sitting next to me blissfully ignored and plugged into the wall charging away! Actually, when we had a lull in the action, I used my cell phone to make an Enterprise Voice call to one of my colleagues. All the while, I was sending and receiving other electronic mails and IMs from other folks.

I’m a remote virtually “officed” Messaging Engineer at Enabling Technologies to begin with. On this day, I had to work about as remotely as anyone could and was able to conduct business as usual with minimal disruption to my customer! We were able to get what we had to get done and avoided a slip in the schedule.

If that’s not a testimonial for Office Communications Server and Unified Communications…..I don’t know what is!