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Another Social Center Demo

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It used to be that people could tell how busy I was by how long my hair got between haircuts.  Now you can by how long I go between blog posts.  The good news is that I've been very busy this past few months, and at least from where I'm standing, it looks like the economy is improving and enterprises are buying again.  We've already beat our sales goal for the quarter and now we're trying how much we can beat it by the end of the month – that's a good feeling.

I've recorded another demo of our Social Center concept software, and we're starting to roll it out to more users inside Gold Systems.  Internally it's like "Twitter for the enterprise" in that as people change their presence and notes I can see those changes appear in the order they happen.  Already I'm feeling better connected to the people I follow.  Sometimes it is work related but not always – for instance I found out that one of the people I'm working with is having twins, which is pretty appropriate for her to announce it that way, because she introduced me to her fiance a few years ago using Microsoft OCS video conferencing.

You can watch the demo here – www.youtube.com/goldsys  If you are interested in this sort of thing, Opus Research also just wrote a piece about what we're doing and that's available on the Gold Systems blog here – http://www.goldsys.com/blog/news/gold-systems-makes-ocs-more-social 

Social Networking in the Enterprise

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I talked to Dan Miller from Opus Research this week, and when he blogged about our conversation I realized that *I* had not yet blogged about this. 

Dan and I talked about how Microsoft's Office Communications Server can be extended and even embedded into other applications.  At the Worldwide Partner Conference this year in New Orleans I was doing a demo of how we had created "Twitter for the Enterprise" using OCS, and on the last day of the conference I recorded this live demo.  I was sitting in the U.S. Partner area, which of course included a Starbucks.  If you listen carefully you might hear the barista in the background.

Today Unified Communications and Office Communications Server in particular are getting attention because enterprises see the technology as cheaper than buying and maintaining legacy phone systems.

If they get some productivity improvements, which can be tough to quantify, then that's just a bonus.  But to me that's like replacing typewriters with PCs in the old days.   The future potential of the PC was far more valuable than the incremental costs savings that were gained by improving word processing.  The same thing will happen here.  Applications of great value will be created that simply aren't possible with today's communications infrastructure that is based on hardware more than software.

Enterprises will not buy phone systems in the future, any more than they buy word processing systems today.  Communications of all types, not just voice, will be a part of all of our applications and it will be because today we are rebuilding the infrastructure using software, not silicon and copper wire running to each and every place where we need to communicate.