Great video showing the future of integrated collaboration
In this video we can see Microsoft Office Communicator in all it’s glory. I particularly liked:
- the seamless escalation between collaboration modes, from IM to Phone, to Video, to Virtual Meeting
- the integration of presence and Outlook calendar
- the ability to easily search AD for a contact and instantly have all the same services available that you would have for a person on your buddy list
- the high levels of integration with Office, ie all the features available where ever you see a persons name
- the fact that line of business apps are leveraging that same integration where ever you see a person as well (contextual collaboration)
- the federation to public infrastructure services, Yahoo, MSN and AOL
- the enterprise class security
of course this is just the beginning, this video shows some of the stuff that is on the horizon, particularly focussed on helping mitigate some of the concerns over the downsides of being always connected and the problems of information overload
Many of the ‘presence’ ideas came from the Uni of Cambridge. In 1992 I had them demonstrated to me at what was then the Olivetti Lab by Prof. Andy Hopper, on his Pandora’s Box. Multi-media, multi-channel communications with named users located in a wireless Iin fact, infrared) sentient network. We were informed of the presence of and and rang Prof. Maurice Wilkes in another building, and held a videophone conference with him. Microsoft has now put a lot of these ideas in real products, in a magnificent way.