In addition to training on Office Communicator, Microsoft also offers free instructor-led sessions on Office Live Meeting. Visit a class and explore key Live Meeting usage scenarios through live demonstrations and hands-on activities. Classes are held in a virtual classroom and allow hands-on experience to build knowledge, skills, and confidence to .. more »

There’s a buzz in the air in Dubai - the electricity of optimistic growth. The airport gives an amazing first impression, blending the high tech look of the new terminal with touches for Arabia in the arches, sconces with (cloth) flames, and the ceiling painted with the deep blue, star-studded night sky. The ride into town is more of the same: th.. more »

Imagine a modern city where business, trade, society, architecture, religion, culture, continents, and history all come together in one place. Got it? OK, then Istanbul, Turkey, is very likely that place. Istanbul (formerly Constantinople and before that), sits astride the Bosporus, a magnificent waterway that connects the interior of eastern .. more »

Do you have end users that need Office Communicator training? Are your users maximizing the basic features of OC? Microsoft now offers a free instructor-led session that introduces key Office Communicator usage scenarios through live demonstrations and hands-on activities. This live course is held in a virtual classroom via Office Live Meeting. .. more »

Last week I accompanied a system integrator in the Midwest to meet with and help educate several of their customers about unified communications and building a UC strategy. In addition to the Midwest hospitality and better weather than I expected, I got some good insights into what these customers are thinking about regarding UC. I was gratified to .. more »

The bottom line payoff for UC-based business communications has been widely promoted as With the rapid adoption of personalized mobile, multimodal, smartphones by both consumers and business users, the opportunity to exploit UC for both inbound and outbound (proactive notifications) real-time interactions between customers, enterprise .. more »

New Instructor-Led Training: Introduction to Office Communicator Microsoft now offers a free instructor-led session that introduces key Office Communicator usage scenarios through live demonstrations and hands-on activities. This live course is held in a virtual classroom via Office Live Meeting. It will allow you hands-on experience to build .. more »

This information was originally posted by In an effort to provide enhanced capacity and service reliance, Windows Live Messenger will soon be adding an additional IP address used for PIC/Federation traffic.  Some organizations have chosen to restrict this type of traffic to specific IP addresses, as referenced in Microsoft KB 897567 ( ).  With th.. more »

As we start the New Year with Exchange 2010 in market, I wanted to share more of the stories we are hearing from our customers how a few of our customers, are utilizing the new features in Exchange 2010. But, now with a couple months since launch, it is incredibly rewarding to hear how so many customers are benefiting from Exchange 2010. Offering .. more »

Switching From Lotus Notes to Exchange and SharePoint Just Got Easier With New Migration Tools and a Free Training Offer for Notes Professionals In my job, I’m privileged to spend a lot time with current and prospective customers. In the last six months, as I’ve met with companies switching from Lotus Notes to Microsoft, I have consistently hear.. more »

In advance of Lotusphere, IBM is touting a big cloud win with Panasonic who they claim will be using LotusLive for 380,000 people, and IBM is claiming this as a replacement of Microsoft Exchange.  These claims around Panasonic compel me to shed some light on the real facts.  Panasonic, which has just under 300,000 employees, was already using No.. more »

Athens! A cradle of western civilization. I arrived in Greece with enough time to visit the Acropolis, the neighboring Areopagus, and the marvelous new Acropolis museum. Even the Metro station in the center of the city has a 100-foot long wall of glass showing the layers of civilization back to 600 BCE, which were exposed during construction of the .. more »

Have you ever installed an Office Communication Server and wanted to verify your remote access was setup and configured properly? Or what if you get a call or an escalation regarding a service or connection not working? How do you verify whether the issue is with an individual user or with everyone throughout the company? And if there is a problem, .. more »

What better place to start this series than in Cincinnati, Ohio? Known for nearly twocenturies as a center of American manufacturing, this strength continues, augmented by major media firms (including print, broadcast and Internet) as well as major distribution firms, including HQs of a leading fast food chain. Of course, this is supported by .. more »

Theres been a lot of discussion of Collaboration lately, what with Ciscos use of the term as another redefinition of their marketing messages and positioning, as well as with the continued advancement of collaboration platforms from IBM, Microsoft, Google, and many others. Fortunately, we realized the importance of collaboration from the beginning .. more »

Check it out here! Now you can go to one location on MSDN to get any docs you need for your speech application needs... .. more »

Office Communications Server and Client Troubleshooting and Support You know it; we know it: Stuff happens. There are times when an unforeseen confluence of circumstances causes problems in your deployment (which only an hour ago was running perfectly): Interaction with some piece of new hardware or software, the need for some atypical set of .. more »

Analysts talk all the time about drinking from the fire hose when we attend vendor analyst briefings, but I think that Cisco had that fire hose on stun this week. They claimed they were announcing 61 or more (I lost count) products this week, and Im sure they werent kidding. Granted many were perhaps features, sub products or new releases, but the .. more »

From time to time, UCStrategies.com experts are invited to be keynote speakers at customer events sponsored by leading vendors in Unified Communications.In addition to our sessions at conferences such as VoiceCon and InterOp, Blair Pleasant ( ), and Don Van Doren and I ( ) have each enjoyed responding to those requests to provide independent .. more »

I spent a few days in San Francisco at the Cisco Collaboration Summit. John Chambers, as always, did an amazing job of positioning Cisco as a leader and innovator. I totally agreed with Chambers when he said that the technology for collaboration is the easy party, but changing a companys culture is hard, and its especially hard to change the way .. more »