Till now, corporate communication has heavily relied upon email and phone to get the message across. IM has been popular as a consumer communication medium for quite a while, but its uptake in the corporate world has not been dramatic. Lately, with improved bandwidth and constant connectivity, video messaging is picking up as a viable option for real-time communication. Also, with businesses spanning geographical boundaries, corporations are looking for a mechanism to conduct meetings electronically. And all of these technologies exist today but as disparate silos of applications. Here are a few examples

 

  1. Email – Do I even need to enlist providers or solutions hereJ?
  2. IM – Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AOL. All have a strong presence in the consumer market
  3. Phone – again, a plethora of providers. A point to be mentioned is the recent rise of VoIP as medium for conducting voice calls over the Internet
  4. Meetings – most done using conference call. Specialized meeting software like Live Meeting are starting to emerge to allow more content (besides voice) to be communicated
  5. Video – most IM clients provide video functionality, though the quality leaves a lot to be desired.

 The problem lies in the very fact that these technologies manifest themselves in different applications and devices and users have a hard time learning and using them. At least I did. I send a message to my colleague and get an OOF (out of office) message. Then I try calling his phone to get a voicemail. I need to use multiple applications and devices to get my message across. What if there existed one application that provided a unified interface to all these technologies? What if you could find a co-worker in your large enterprise by just entering his name and then using one application, be able to email, IM, call, video conference, and invite to a conference call or set up a live meeting? What if you can see OOF as status in your IM client, instead of having to email the person and then find out? What if your IM status is set automatically based on your Outlook calendar? What if this application can be integrated in your everyday collaboration software so that you could access its functionality from right within your email client or word processor? Sounds futuristic? Well then the future is here – Office Communicator 2005.

 

Sounds a like a marketing pitch? The reason is I am super impressed by this technology. Code named Istanbul; I feel that Office Communicator 2005 (OC) is one of the coolest technologies to expect in the near future. OC is the front end client to the Live Communication Server (LCS). I installed the beta bits 4 days ago, and I am hooked to it. This slick looking app provides you an interface to send email, have IM conversations, do application sharing, make phone calls using the corporate PBX system, make and recieve VoIP phone calls, and make conference calls. In future, it will even allow me to connect to public IM services like AOL, Yahoo and MSN so I won’t need to have 3 different messenger clients running on my machine.

 

Betanews has an article on OC and its features. Eileen has a blog entry that links to the webcast of the Bill keynote at RTC web conference, where OC demo was shown. She also points to link where you can sign up for the beta program.