Ovum reviews the new MS Office Communicator. Straightforward analysis of its capabilities, and thus useful reading for me from the competitive perspective. More interesting was Ovum's "Big Picture":
While Microsoft will undoubtedly continue to play a leading role in the collaboration software world, it will suffer when compared with other players in this market, such as Oracle and IBM. Both of these organisations have simple coherent messages for the collaboration tools they deliver, even though the functionality is actually provided by multiple pieces of software underneath the covers in both cases.Link: Ovum: Office Communicator - the next collaboration tool from Microsoft > (via Michael Sampson's Shared Spaces)
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Hosun Lee | 6/10/2005 10:12:55 AM
I've seen demos of Communicator. Very powerful tool. And it's something that I believe many corporations will embrace. Free client, integration with VoIP networks, integration with Exchange and so on. And the standard Microsoft shiny UI.
As the author noted though, Groove is the red-headed step child. It doesn't integrate with any Office product per se, and it comes off as Sharepoint for non-networked employees.
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Peter de Haas http://www.peterdehaas.com | 6/11/2005 5:55:15 AM
I'm very glad it is only the message around the offering that needs to be revisted according to Ovum.
I would agree to a certain extend the message could be more consistent and should be worked on.
The message around Real Time Collaboration (around Office Communicator, Live Communications Server and LiveMeeting) is quite clear according to me.
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Paul Robichaux http://www.e2ksecurity.com | 6/11/2005 9:32:41 PM
@1: the big guys (Cisco, Avaya, &c) have standardized interfaces. VoIP is mostly an end-run around them.
Ed: Oracle's message is clear? Sheesh. Only if "we've missed our ship date for OCS release 3 two or three times now" is clear.
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Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 6/12/2005 3:45:37 AM
@4 - Oracle? Must have been my blind spot for competitors with insignificant market share. I didn't even notice their mention :-o
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Stuart Downes | 6/13/2005 2:53:12 AM
There is one simple feature of Office Communicator which IBM could easily implement in Sametime. I discuss this here.... { Link }
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Brian Green | 6/13/2005 3:06:45 PM
@6 - Interesting idea. I suppose this would require the Sametime Server to read the user's "out of office" settings. And if it can do that, it would seem logical to let the user change their OOO settings directly from the IM clients.
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Amit | 6/21/2006 6:05:13 PM
For office communicator to integrate with a IP Based PBX what is required.
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Madhu | 8/17/2006 7:15:02 PM
I wanted to integrate a speaker phone with OC 2005 for desktop. Is there any API/SDK available to do this? I wanted to display different call states on the device.
Thanks for help in advance
Curious. Do the phone system manufacturers have a standard API for interacting with their phone systems? Is this still evolving? Or is such a thing left to the software companies (like IBM and Microsoft) to create? Integrating a company's instant messaging "presence" with a phone system is powerful. I'm wondering if all the software providers have agreed on a standard way of doing it.
{ Link }