Jay's Tech Blog

Unified Communication All Begins With Presence……..


the jellybean or whatever you want to call it. This feature is often overlooked, but to get to the heart of Microsoft’s Unified Messaging, you must start with presence. To an admin this is pretty much a black box, just don’t touch it and presence will work. To an end user this is a great feature. From standard office applications, to business critical servers, presence is the feature that unifies all of them. To expand on this, there is a software development kit (SDK) that can be used to integrate presence into homegrown applications.

You ask “What this has to do with anything?”. The answer is that the true defining characteristic of unified communications is presence. There would be no real time communication without knowing a person’s availability. In fact, communicating without presence is email.

Recently, I was doing a technical demonstration of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server R2. The audience was not the standard fair of IT decision makers, but instead it was a bunch of geeks. I can say this because I am one, just ask my wife, she shot down the idea of an f5 in my home lab. The attendees asked a lot of questions but not one about return on investment (ROI). The questions based around comparing features to other available products. Voice was compared to Vonage, Skype, and Cisco Call Manager. Instant Messaging was placed in the same bucket as MSN Messenger, AOL, and Yahoo. While some IM applications do have presence built in, it does not spill into other applications. Even twitter and Facebook were compared. Web conferencing was compared to a plethora of available services, including Microsoft’s own LiveMeeting. All of these different options could provide the abilities of the OCS suite, but no one can offer these features as a whole. They would have to be mixed and matched to create all the features of OCS. These products should not be confused with a unified solution.


I have to admit that I was caught off guard with the questions. Usually, my attendees are wowed by enterprise voice and on premise web conferencing. In this situation that was not the case. In the end I realized something, if I have to explain unified communications, I better focus on presence. You can lead with any of the OCS suite of features, Instant Messaging, web conferencing, and enterprise voice, but PRESENCE is the true hero of Office Communications Server. Unified Communications is Presence, and Presence is Unified Communications.

Jay