Today Jeff Raikes (President, MS Business Division) and Anoop Gupta (Corp VP, Unified Communications Group) officially revealed the next step in Microsoft Unified Communications (UC) Roadmap. 

Jeff spent alot of time talking about the challenges in how people work today.  A few informational tidbits he threw out included the average company has 6.4 communication devices and 4.8 communication applications per user.  Jeff spoke about how today we work in infrastructure islands.  Your telephone is an island; your cell phone is an island, your IM client is an island; your email client is an island; your collaboration tools (e.g. SharePoint) are on an island, etc. 

One of the goals of the UC team is to provide a platform that is people centric with a single identity.  Hmm.. What is Microsoft's latest marketing slogan.... something about "People Ready Business".  Instead of having a different identity for each infrastructure island, you have one.  Obviously, Active Directory is where that identity is stored.  My sense is that Microsoft is basically positioning UC as a platform choice where developers will be enticed to build cool applications. 

Microsoft is emphasizing their continuing investment in the UC "Ecosystem".  Today, they have services and infrastructure partners like PointBridge and HP.  They are expanding the ecosystem to include Mobility and Devices.  Mobility right now is just Motorola.  Devices include LG/Nortel, Thompson, Polycom, and a bunch of mobility device manufacturers.  You can see they are bringing several of the important best of breed telephony players to the Microsoft platform.  Does this remind you of Windows and COM development back in the late 90s?  With all this cool stuff, what developer wouldn't want to build some AJAX/web services/XML gobbledeegook application using biztalk on top of the UC platform?  Does that mean all of our infrastructure consultants need .Net training? 

Ok, unfair inside joke but hey.. it's my blog.  Hold the flame comments please.

In terms of products, they spent most of the day talking about the next version of LCS, officially called Office Communications Server 2007 and the client Office Communicator 2007.  At this time, Live Meeting will remain a separate product.  Microsoft Office Communications Server or what I'm calling MOCS adds multi-party video and audio conferencing.  I was disappointed in the amount of information they shared on new functionality.  Jeff or Anoop said something that was a little disturbing.  One of them said that MOCS will support "on premise audio/video/voice".  In December, I attended a preview of MOCS.  They were touting this large grid that showed all of the combinations of network devices (e.g. think firewall, router, nat) that a video stream must traverse between two people on separate corporate networks.  They were touting that they had figured out a way to ensure two people could do a video conference regardless of what network device they were behind.  Doesn't "on premise" sound like "on the same LAN"?  That's not much better than what we have today.  I hope that piece is still a work in progress. 

I was also disappointed they didn't talk about presence documents.  I guess they only had 2 hours so something had to be cut out.  They showed what's being called the "Communicator Phone Experience".  They are getting phone vendors to embed communicator like software in their phones.  Pretty cool.

Now, there were the cool demos.  They showed a girl listening to emails in the car on her mobile phone and then replying to them verbally.  This is the new Exchange 2007 functionality.  They showed Roundtable which is the panoramic video conferencing device that contains several cameras.  When somebody starts talking it senses the location of the voice and switches to the appropriate camera.  This is much better than a single video camera panning to the person talking and making me sick.  There was a demo where a manager clicked on a link in communicator which started a new user provisioning process.  The provisioning process was similar to what the credit card companies have when you speak through the phone to select options.  The demo showed how user accounts, mailboxes, etc. could be created by anybody through this voice response system.  The point was to show how developers could leverage the UC platform to create useful applications. 

Office Communicator Server 2007 is due out Q2 of 2007.  I signed an NDA a couple weeks to get the beta bits when they become available.  Now that we have that monster virtual server, we should be able to get something running in the lab soon.  I'd love to see this working with Exchange 2007.