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 »

We’ve just published a new Updates Resource Center for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Clients on the OCS TechCenter.   And we’ve gone one step further: Our Sustained Engineering and support teams* have created a Cumulative Server Update Installer tool to help simplify the application of the updates. The Cumulative Server Update Instal.. more »

than weve ever had for a release of Exchange. (one of the worlds leading inter-dealer brokers) has already saved $1 million by replacing their SAN with DAS (direct-attached storage) using Exchange 2010, and expects to save 50 percent on their storage costs. (a US-based investment firm) is cutting storage costs by 15% and has saved $400,000 in .. more »

Another VoiceCon has come and gone – while the exhibit hall wasn’t as full with exhibitors as in years past, it was still a great VoiceCon, with lots of information-packed sessions, and opportunities for networking with vendors, customers, and peers. To help prepare for my locknote session, I jotted down notes about what I thought some of the key .. more »

Among the usual chatter about What do you think of the show, at VoiceCon this week were comments about the need to modify some of the usual presentations that we have on comparing vendor offerings in unified communications, and where the industry is in unified communications. The vendors I talked to commonly voiced that for the most part, comparing .. more »

Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communications Server R2 have two multi forest topologies that have been tested by and are supported by Microsoft. One of these topologies is the Office Communications Server Resource forest \ User forest topology and the other is the Office Communications Server Central forest and User forest topology. .. more »

We've been working on the Downloads page on the Communications Server TechCenter! Check out the improvements:          Separate pages devoted to 2007 R2 Downloads and 2007 Downloads;          Clearer categorization of available 2007 R2 downloads;        &.. more »

They are so good, that I cant help sharing some of these early highlights just a sneak peek of what is to come. Some organizations are now bringing in Exchange to do the job once managed by four or five different systems, and the results are really impressive. With Exchange 2010, youve got a full e-mail, calendar and contacts solution, built-in .. more »

One of the little known features of Office Communicator is the ability to make consultative transfers.  Very often we’ve been asked to include this feature, however it’s already included! As background, a consultative transfer is a common scenario where before transferring a call to someone you want to contact the person you’re transferring to firs.. more »

Copyright 2009 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide While business managers in enterprise organizations may just be starting to research their operational business needs to identify and prioritize their UC requirements to improve business processes, IT management must also prepare to migrate existing telephone systems into the coming UC .. more »

We are pleased to announce that the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Speech Server (a.k.a. Speech Server (2007)) runtime is now officially supported on Windows Server 2008, in addition to the originally supported Windows Server 2003 Platforms(listed at Microsoft will support application deployments, Administrative tools and Data .. more »

We need to alert you to an issue that is under investigation with the applying of KB974571 (MS09-056: Vulnerabilities in CryptoAPI could allow spoofing) that will cause the LCS or OCS server to show running with the evaluation version and then noting it as expired. The post below provides a great write up for reference and for the sake of those .. more »

We are excited to announce changes to the Office Communications Server Public IM Connectivity (PIC) license that provides instant messaging and presence federation to the Windows Live, AOL and Yahoo! public IM networks. Starting October 1, 2009, the following licensing changes will be made: A PIC License will no longer be required for .. more »

I ran across this blog by Houston Neal of Software Advice.com, on seven great applications for IP-PBXs in the medical field, which is a good start to laying out what can be done in different vertical markets with IP, particularly in the medical field, which is ripe for transformation. Houston points out, that in his practice of advising companies .. more »

As we all know, in the world of computers we have a binary system. Either something works (1) or it does not (0). And as all of us really know, there is another state, that we all loath, "works sometimes" (1.5). Recently I ran into a problem with my Office Communicator 2007 Phone Edition (OCPE aka Tanjay) running on Communicator Phone Edition R2, .. more »

The 32 bit version of the PreCallDiagnostic tool is complete and is now live on the Microsoft Download Center.  Customers can now access the download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f16ab4c2-353f-4c9b-b353-22a656c03c9b.  The 64 bit version of PCD shipped as part of the OCS 2007 R2 Resource Kit with Office Co.. more »

While the waiting game is over regarding the winner of the auction for Nortel Enterprise, there are still many unanswered questions – mainly the who’s and the what’s. Who – we heard from Avaya and Nortel in a press/analyst call that Avaya has agreed with a minimum employee transfer of 75% of Nortel employee work force at the time of close of.. more »

Microsoft released their Visual Search beta on Bing this morning. It’s pretty cool, particularly if you are a visual person. I played around with some of the categories they had listed to show off the application. One category, dog breeds, really shows how this software shines, compared to doing searches on Google. I’ve done this search before when.. more »