Microsoft UC Launch: Jeff Raikes & Bill Gates

The link to presence and identity is a really important point - and to extend that into the area of social computing is another direction to consider re: social presence not just presence as it pertains to a network, device or application (refer to my earlier post "Social Presence: We Need To Push The Reset Button".

That said - it raises some questions:

• Why does Microsoft still not federate with Google via XMPP?
• Why does Microsoft not openly state its direction on some of the IETF-related presence standards?
• Should Microsoft take its PSOM protocol (used in its web conferencing components) and treat it as an open standard (similar to XMPP)?
• Will Microsoft openly expose its granular rich presence information in a bi-directional manner to other vendors (Microsoft's assumption is that OCS is the master presence platform but many companies will have more than one presence aggregation point)?

Thinking of UC in terms of visual experiences, Microsoft Surface and gaming are intriguing areas when you also consider social computing trends as well as where UC intersects with virtual worlds. The interesting angle on UC for me as they talked is the notion of "feeds" - presence is a type of feed - there are also the RSS/Atom type feeds which I believe should also be put into a UC context.

Notes (not exact quotes)

• Productivity - to many communications that end up in different containers (e-mail, IM, etc) - need to unify communications, transitions across modalities, etc.
• Presence and identity and strongly linked
• No blind calls with presence
• Multiple demos
• Steamlined communications
• Operational efficiency
• Built-in protection
• Software foundation
• Click-to-communicate contextually within application
• Dynamics discussion ... will support UC elements re: presence and click-to-communicate within CRM user experience, ERP will in future - communication enabled business processes
• Integration into application development process.
• It's the software not the network
• 100M people in their information work will have a click-to-communicate in 3 years at a 50% reduced costs vs. today
• All of Intel are using OCS and Office Communications Server worldwide
• CIO of L'Occitane discussion ...
• Announcements: Mitel and Eriicsson will build solutions on top of Microsoft's UC platform; SAP integrating presence and click-to-communicate within Duet
• Bill Gates comes back on stage and discusses some futures where UC includes aspects of Surface, speech (the entire area of gesture and haptics comes into play with UC down the road).