Unified Communications

Update on the Network World podcast about UC

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Mitchell Ashley just did an update post on his Network World blog about the Microsoft Office Communications Server R2 release and what this means for the enterprise.  This one is a text post and covers some of the ground we covered in the podcast, particularly around the cost savings I’m experiencing in my own business by eliminating voice conferencing costs.  He also touches on the costs I expect to save when all of my communications channels are via the Internet.

In the early days of Gold Systems, Jim and I would agonize about adding the expense of each new phone line.  When we bought our first real phone system, we thought we were finally a “real business” even though we cheaped out and wrote our own voicemail system.  (That’s harder than it looks by the way.  The guy who did it still works with us and I’m always amazed when I think back on what he accomplished.  We used it for many years before buying a commercial voicemail system.)

When we started buying phone lines by the T1, the expenses really started racking up.  I’m going to see the day very soon I think where we have no phone lines, and our communications expenses will be less than it was our first few years in business.  Amazing.  I may not see the day of “electricity too cheap to meter” but we’re getting pretty close in the world of communications.

 

Microsoft OCS 2007 R2 Virtual Launch event today

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OCS 2007 Virtual Launch Microsoft is officially launching Office Communications Server 2007 R2 today.  If you want to attend the virtual launch, go here and register.  Be sure and stop by the Gold Systems booth.  We won't be able to give you the chocolate gold coins that we usually have at trade shows, but hey, you didn't have to fly half-way across the country either, right?  With travel budgets being slashed, I'm really curious to see how a virtual launch works for people.  While I was writing this, the launch officially opened.

A big part of the OCS experience is in communicating better with people when you can't just sit down face to face.  I'm getting more done with less hassles, and the company is saving money.

I wrote about the savings that we're actually experiencing with the new release on the Gold Systems blog - it's over $3,000 a month, and I expect that to go to maybe $6,000 a month once we disconnect our old voice T1s and POTs lines.  And we're a small company – our customers will save a lot more.

I see the press releases are starting to hit – our good partner Polycom just mentioned us in one of their press releases.

Update #1:  I just heard that Gold Systems was mentioned in the keynote address.  Like most trade shows, I was unable to attend the keynote, but with this show, I'll be able to go back and watch it later.

Update #2:  Here's the link to the post I wrote on the Gold Systems blog about our actual cost savings.

Update #3:  Here's our own press release in the wild.

Update #4:  Mitchell Ashley just did an update post on his Network World blog about the R2 release and what this means for the enterprise.

Network World Podcast about Unified Communications

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Capture Mitchell Ashley called me last week to talk about Unified Communications and the work my company is doing with Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2.  Mitchell has put the conversation up as a podcast on the Network World website at http://www.networkworld.com/podcasts/com/2009/012209com-uc.html  I’ve enjoyed reading Mitchell’s Converging Network blog since I discovered it last year, so it was a real pleasure to be the subject of one his posts.

We talked a lot about what it’s like as a user to have true unified communications and how much easier it makes my life.  One of the big changes is we’ve cut our conference call expenses by $3,000 a month just by hosting the calls ourselves.  During the call I mentioned that my part of the conversation was all over VoIP using SIP trunks from Bandwidth.com connected to our Microsoft Office Communications Server R2.  I was using a Polycom CX700 aka Tanjay phone plugged into our Ethernet network.  Mitchell was using Skype, so we may have not been using any copper phone lines anywhere in the connection.  The quality was great.

We’ve come a long way from the two-line phone and answering machine that Jim and I bought at Target when we started the company!

 

President Obama Tests Microsoft Office Communications Server

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A couple of days ago I realized that a lot of people were going to be late to work today so that they could stay home and watch the Inauguration, or they were going to come to work and watch CNN from their desktops.  The last thing President Obama needs on his first day at work is a big drop in the GDP, so I decided to stream the Inauguration into our main conference room for anyone who wanted to watch. 

At Gold Systems we now have most of our outbound calls, and many of our inbound calls routing via SIP trunks from Bandwidth.com over our Qwest Fiber 10mbps Internet connection.  Because of that, we were very curious to see how everything would hang together today during what was likely to be an Internet-bandwidth-saturating event.

We were streaming the video in the conference room, and I’m sure many people were watching from their desktops.  At the peak we saw 68% saturation of our internet connection, and phone calls via the SIP trunks were “clear as a bell” according to Ned.  I’m sure that a lot of Internet and communications systems got tested today, and I hope they held up as well as ours did.

Oh – someone needs to go write a Wikipedia entry for SIP Trunks.  Wikipedia thought I meant Swim Trunks.

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Win 7 to Win 7 via Live Mesh to Windows Home Server

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This just blows my mind, or maybe I’m just sleep deprived.

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It was cold in the garage, so I came inside and used my desktop machine which is now running Windows 7, to open up a Live Mesh remote desktop connection to the FJ Cruiser sitting in the garage.  (The computer is powered up but the FJ is dark.)  While checking out the Windows 7 install on the FJ Cruiser Car Computer, I opened up the Windows Home Server Console to make sure the FJ will get automatically backed up tonight. In the snip above I’m interacting with three different computers – 2 in my office, and one in the garage. 

I used the snipping tool to grab the screen capture and saved it as a jpg in a folder that is sync’d between all my machines via Live Mesh.  A moment later the jpg was sitting on my main desktop that is running Vista, and was ready to be popped into this post. 

OK, I need sleep.

Windows 7 in the FJ Car Computer

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On Friday Microsoft briefly opened up Windows 7 to Gold Certified Partners, and our awesome IT guy grabbed me a copy.  I’ve upgraded a very old desktop (works fine) and I just finished upgrading the FJ Car Computer too.

As you can see it seems to run Office Communicator just fine.  Too bad no one is up at this hour to try a video conference!

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Very cool, I can’t wait to play with it.

Unified Communications in the Car

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OK, I don’t really think that most people are going to be having video conferences in their car in the near term, but just to prove how well Microsoft’s Unified Communications platform works for remote workers, I decided to try it out in the FJ Car Computer.  I’m running Office Communicator R2 on a pretty low-powered Vista machine in my car.  The camera is an off-the-shelf webcam, and I’m connected to a nearby WiFi network.  As you can see the video frame rate and quality is great and it worked just fine.

You can see at the beginning of the video that I had started the conference as an IM session using Office Communicator.  I could see Angela’s presence information and that she was available, so I IM’d her and asked if she had a minute to talk, and then I asked if we could go to video.  I clicked on the video icon and within a few seconds we were having a video conference.  (It’s good manners to ask, but Angela could have denied the video request if she wanted to.)

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I was using one hand to take the video and I was balancing the wireless keyboard on my lap – that explains the fumbling at 1:05 and the inadvertent video of myself!

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Deploying Unified Communications is an important part of what my company does, and I believe we’ll be creating all sorts of new applications in the future.  It’s already changed how I work, which reminds me, it’s time to revisit my Office of the Future post and give an update.  We’re making some progress.  One person suggested we not even have offices, which lead to my Wireless in the Wilderness post.

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Interesting uses of Unified Communications

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It’s late on a Friday afternoon, and I just got an IM from someone at my company asking if I had a master key to his office.  He had locked himself out with his wallet and keys inside, but he was able to get to a computer and he used Office Communicator to see who was still in the office.  Without communicator, he would have had to start calling people hoping someone would pick up the phone at 6:10 on a Friday night, or he would have had to send out an email to everyone in the company asking for help.  This way, only me and one other person knew about his mistake.  Until now that is . . . . 🙂

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Bye!

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Kentuckian, inventor of Wireless Telephony

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I was exchanging emails with a new friend in Australia who is promoting Gold Systems’ Password Reset product, and in the conversation I mentioned (as I often do) that I was originally from Kentucky.  I have a list of Kentucky facts to counter any hillbilly jokes, and I sent him a few.  Since he’s from Australia I figured he might know about Daniel Boone or the Beverly Hillbillies but not much else.

One of the facts is this:

  • The radio was invented by a Kentuckian named Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray in 1892. It was three years before Marconi made his claim to the invention.

As I hit send, I wondered, is this really true?  Well, according to Wikipedia, it is – sort of.

Nathan B. Stubblefield (November 22, 1860 – March 28, 1928) was an American inventor and Kentucky melon farmer. It has been claimed that Stubblefield invented the radio before either Nikola Tesla or Guglielmo Marconi, but his devices seem to have worked by audio frequency induction or, later, audio frequency earth conduction [1] (creating disturbances in the near-field region) rather than by radio frequency radiation for radio transmission telecommunications. Though there were contemporaneous experiments by others such as William Preece, Stubblefield has been proposed as a claimant for the invention of wireless telephony, or wireless transmission of the human voice.  — From Wikipedia

So, I’m not the first kid from Kentucky to get involved with telephony.  I love the fact that he was described as an American inventor and melon farmer.

Now here is one of those coincidences that I love so much.  Another fact that I have in my list is:

  • The public saw an electric light for the first time in Louisville. Thomas Edison introduced his incandescent light bulb to crowds at the Southern Exposition in 1883.

I don’t have a reference to that, so I did a quick search.  While it may be true that the first American public display was in Kentucky, in 1883, according to this website, the first publc display was in 1863, in . . . . Australia.

Help Wanted and getting things done

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This post on "getting things done" is brought to you by Gold Systems, a Unified Communications software company in Boulder, Colorado.  If you are a Unified Communications Specialist, a Telecom Engineer, a sales professional or a software Engineer and you think you just might want to consider a career change, check out the job postings at http://www.goldsys.com/index.php?load=content&page_id=28  Doesn’t matter too much where you live – you’d be welcome to join us in sunny Boulder, Colorado, but we have people all over the U.S. if you happen to like where you currently live.

Now back to the blog – I’ve had a task on my task list to write the three sentences above for about a week.  Once I sat down to do it, it took me about five minutes.   And that reminds me of a blog post I’ve been meaning to write.

A few years ago Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, came to CU Boulder to talk about his experience as an entrepreneur.  It was a great thrill to hear him speak and to talk to him for a minute after his presentation.  One story he told was how in the very early days of Amazon.com they (him included) would box up books to ship out to customers. The orders started pouring in and they found they were spending a lot of time on their knees on a hard concrete floor boxing up books.

Jeff said that he’d finally had enough, and he told someone that he was going to the local home improvement store to buy knee pads like the kind carpenters often wear.  The other person said, "Jeff, why don’t we just buy tables instead?"  He told the story I think to illustrate how easy it is to get so busy that you get so focused on the task at hand that you can’t think about the real problem and the best way to solve it.

I see this all the time, and it is an easy trap to fall into.  A good entrepreneur friend of mine doesn’t have time to investigate buying a high-quality spam filter, so he spends time every day or two going through the spam to make sure nothing important is getting trapped by his low-quality spam filter.  It’s like buying kneepads instead of a table.

I figured out a long time ago that as an entrepreneur, there would always be more for me to do than there was time to do it.  The first five years or so I stressed out about it all the time, thinking that I needed to work longer hours to get everything done.  I needed to get everything done, I thought.  I tended to work on the least important, most urgent tasks but then my friend Jim Lejeal pointed out that the CEO’s job is to work on the most important tasks that only the CEO can do, and that the really important tasks are usually not perceived as urgent at all.  It’s normal to have more than we can do, and I think it’s good because if I have a lot of options for how to spend my time, I can try to choose the very best use of my time.  (It’s a goal – I don’t always spend my time on the most important thing – I’m human and I still spend time on silly stuff at times.  It helps keep me sane.)

I created a category on my task list as "The ONE Most Important Thing" just to remind me to think about the one really important thing each day that I can do to move the company forward.

So here’s the tie-in back to my original help wanted post.  I was so busy, I didn’t take five minutes to do something that will ultimately make me and other people at my company less busy.   Now I’ve done it and I can check it off my task list.  What have you not taken time to do, that if you’d just do it, would ultimately save you a lot of time and make your business or your life better?

W3W3 Interview on Unified Communications

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Larry Nelson, the co-founder of w3w3.com Media Network, and Mark Richtermeyer, the CEO of The Spitfire Group, interviewed me last week on the subject of disruptive technology and the effect unified communications is having on the enterprise.   You can find the audio interview here.

Unified communications is a term that means different things to different people, and it isn’t brand new.  Companies like Avaya, Nortel, Cisco and many others have been working to bridge computers and telephones and all the different forms of communications.  When I left AT&T sixteen years ago, it was because I believed there was a place for a new company to help build that bridge. 

More recently Microsoft has made a big move into unified communications.  While I spent a lot of time talking about Microsoft in the interview, I also point out that this is a technology that is going to span across a lot of companies and it will create new opportunities for everyone.  My customers expect us to work with the network, the PBX, the databases and the desktops that they already have installed.  A rising tide floats all boats, and the tide is coming in!

Thanks Larry and Mark, it was fun talking to you both.