Wow, this is neat-- NewsGator just alerted me to a book review of a book called McIlhenny's Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire
(n.b. Julie has written a wonderful tribute to our grandfather-- see here.)
Tim Bloch was born in Alexandria on January 30, 1919, the son of Raphael Bloch and Alix Kilpatrick,
and died on December 3, 2007. He was graduated from Jonesboro-Hodge High School and subsequently attended Louisiana State University until he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He was stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He also served in the South Pacific as a B-17 pilot and in the Italian theater as a squadron commander. He was highly decorated for his service. In May of 1943 he married Phyllis Gibson Barton of Napoleonville.
His business interests were many and varied. He served as state president of the Louisiana Realtors Association, and was proud that Tim Bloch Real Estate served the community for 50 years.
Tim was known as an affable, capable, responsible civic leader. His wit and humor were a delight to his family and friends.
He is survived by his wife, Phyllis Bloch; his brother, Samuel Wheadon Bloch of Kansas City, Missouri; his first cousin, Virginia Wheadon de Gravelles of Lafayette, Louisiana; two daughters, Ann Bloch Robichaux of Perrysburg, Ohio, and Betty Barton Bloch of Metairie, Louisiana; two sons, Ray Beasley Bloch and Daniel Timothy Bloch of Alexandria, Louisiana; and grandchildren Paul Robichaux, Julie Robichaux, Tim Robichaux, Christopher Bloch, Clayton Bloch, Ashley Bloch, and Melissa Bloch.
The funeral was held at St. James Episcopal Church on Wednesday, December 5. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be sent to the Rapides Parish Library, 411 Washington St., Alexandria, Louisiana, 71301, or to the charity of your choice.
Well, OK; I'm not rocking it yet, but I have big plans. The Ravens-Pats game is on TV; my dinner's on the way, and I got to ride MARTA from the airport to my hotel. I'm ready to bring my A game to the session tomorrow!
Now, this is just plain wrong. The two most recent versions of the Lotus Notes clients won't run when Vista User Account Control is enabled. This is despite the fact that IBM claims that Notes 8 is fully compatible with Vista. IBM recommends turning off UAC, which means you actually have to make your desktop less secure to run it.
Upon further investigation, it looks like nsd.exe is the actual component that doesn't work when UAC is enabled. It looks like the only necessary change would be for NSD to ship with a manifest that uses the requireAdministrator flag to signal that the executable needs to run with elevated privileges. This is pretty straightforward, so I wonder if there's some other issue that makes NSD, or another Notes component, fail under UAC. UAC support is required to get Vista logo certification, but I don't have a Notes box handy to see whether IBM is claiming the logo or not.
So, shame on IBM for missing this elementary requirement-- VIsta was out far enough in advance of Notes 8's release for IBM to have sufficient time to support UAC. Shame on Microsoft, too, for not taking proactive action to make sure that such a widely used application would work properly with UAC.
(Bonus vuln: this buffer overflow in the Notes client viewer for 1-2-3 files. It requires a patch, which you must get from IBM support. Too bad IBM doesn't make its patches freely downloadable.)
Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Unified Communications
I'd signed up for a Krav Maga-based gun defense class at our martial arts school. It sounded like a fun way to spend an afternoon, and indeed it was-- all the more so because, at the last minute, Arlene decided to join me! Instead of a typical date, we spent four hours pointing training guns at each other, then taking them away with a variety of strikes, blocks, and pins. She was definitely better at most of the techniques than I was, as we found out during the stress-based testing. It was definitely a different way to spend time together (and sorry about accidentally hitting you in the nose, honey!)
This is the first time in a long time (like, nearly 15 years) that I've been to Alexandria twice in one year. We were there earlier this year for a great family reunion; this time, sad to say, I was visiting my seriously ill grandfather in the hospital. Despite the reason for the visit, it was great to see everyone-- Ray, Dan, Ashley, Melissa, Grandmaw, Betty, Clayton, Laura, and Chris were all there. Ashley is only a few months away from graduating from high school; Melissa and I had fun learning how to balance chemical equations (OK, not really; I don't think she enjoyed it much); I watched Oprah with Betty (cracking wise all the way) and Chris cooked two splendid meals. Last night, I had the first fried trout I've had in at least 20 years, and as a bonus he cooked the best hush puppies I've ever tasted. Tim arrived last night, so we got to visit for a bit (and he told me about his new blog, which has some hysterical pictures so far.)
BTW, the Alexandria airport is terrific! The terminal is beautiful (although there are no concessions in the gate area), and there's free WiFi. I only wish the Toledo airport were as attractive, clean, or well-maintained.
Get ready, folks. Exchange 2007 SP1 ships on the 30th.
Arlene just returned from Best Buy with a brand-new box of win: Rock Band Deluxe Edition. It's a Christmas present for the boys, but I wonder if they believe in early Christmas? It seems a shame to leave it boxed up given the upcoming four-day Thanksgiving weekend. Maybe I can sneakily rock out after they go to bed tonight...
Wow, this is neat-- NewsGator just alerted me to a book review of a book called McIlhenny's Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire
I'm still really enamored of the Microsoft RoundTable conferencing camera. IMHO it's a real breakthrough, and I can't wait until we can get one of our own and start using it regularly for the meetings I have to attend. We faced a problem for the roadshows, though: the RoundTable is an odd shape and doesn't disassemble for transport. I couldn't see shipping a $3000 device in a cardboard box, so I did some digging. As far as I can tell, there's only one company that makes RoundTable-specific cases. Titan Cases of Seattle. We ordered one, and it wasn't cheap (about $335). However, just look at the darn thing. It's practically indestructible. In fact, it should say "CRAFTSMAN" on the front.
Titan offers two models: one with wheels and one without. We took the wheel-less one in hopes that it would be easier to take aboard airplanes. It's done an admirable job so far, but we'll be ordering the next one in 3Sharp green.
It turns out that there are at least two ways you can build custom applications that take advantage of OCS 2007's capabilities for presence, IM, conferencing, and voice. First, you can use the Communicator SDK to do client-side stuff, like asking Communicator to initiate a voice call or change your presence status in response to some action. (I need to find out if Communicator is smart enough to set your status to "away" when you lock your workstation; if not that will probably be my first project.)
Second, you can use the OCS SDK to write server-side code for things like IM content filters. This is also a handy way to write server-side response bots. You can also integrate presence and IM with SharePoint using a fairly simple web part; I'll write more about that later.
Super cool: Devin is this month's MVP of the Month! Congratulations!
Technorati Tags: 3sharp
One common question (or family of questions, I guess) that I get concerns how voice mail messages are handled in the Exchange 2007 transport engine. In particular, a couple of people at the "It's Time to Deploy" events have had questions about how voice messages are journaled. Depending on your organization's records management requirements, you may want to make sure that VMs are journaled, or you may want to affirmatively block them from journaling. It turns out that you can easily do this with the Set-TransportConfig task in EMS. A quick
Set-TransportConfig -VoiceMailJournalingEnabled:$false
will do the trick; the flag is set to enable VM journaling by default, and this command just turns it out.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Communications, Unified Messaging
A few notes gathered during my trip, now that I'm on the way home (yay!) I got up early, finished packing, and ran into my friend Rick Taylor at breakfast. We had a great chat about the perils of raising kids (he has two girls and a boy about the same ages as our three boys). He also told me that Joel Oleson got to go to a sacrament meeting in Barcelona, and I confess to being a bit jealous.
First, airport security in Barcelona is a far cry from what we see in the US. My boarding pass underwent a cursory check, but no one checked my passport. At the screening point, no one asked me to take off my shoes or remove my laptop (though I did have to go back through the metal detector because my watch and class ring together were enough to set it off.) There were no shouting uniformed bullies, and no screening for liquids. This might be because of a casual attitude towards security at this one airport (security at Amsterdam is much more US-like), or it might be a more realistic assessment of the actual threat.
Second: my KLM flight BCN-AMS was delayed by about 45 minutes, but no one at BCN seemed to care. I thought I could call Northwest to get protected for my AMS-DTW leg, but once you check in, only the airline operating your first segment can modify the ticket. No one ever made announcements about the flight status or delay time, and two of the three gate agents I spoke to didn't know how long the BCN-AMS flight was supposed to take. I guess that's better than getting bogus announcements every 15 minutes, as sometimes happens on Comair. I just barely caught my AMS-DTW flight. Good thing AMS is uncrowded and easy to navigate. I never would have made a 30-minute connection at CDG, for example.
Third, intra-Europe business class isn't what you think. I was seated in seat 2C, in what would be "domestic first" in the US. The seat pitch and size are identical to the coach seats, and seating on the 737 is 3-3, just like in coach. The difference? One, there are no complimentary upgrades (at least as far as I can tell) so it's only about half-full. Second, they serve your choice of two hot entrees, plus hot bread. I had a grilled chicken breast with mango and pepper coulis, trout tartare, and a small square of chocolate-banana cake. All were delicious, way better than domestic US first-class food-- and all this on a two-hour flight. (Extra bonus: KLM 737s have in-seat power using regular outlets.)
Fourth, the video-on-demand system on NWA's A330 is really slick. I watched the Simpsons Movie (laughing my butt off the whole time) and was able to start and pause it when I wanted-- almost as nice as being in my living room with ye olde Tivo.
Finally, I'm looking forward to having a couple of weeks without any air travel.
Birthday bonus: NW lost my bags. Thanks, guys. (The FA did offer me a birthday bottle of champagne, though, so I guess that outweighs the temporary hassle of being bag-free).
For dinner, I went out with a group of MS folks to a local restaurant called 7 Portes. It's been here since 1837, if that tells you anything. Wow, it was good! Our table of about a dozen people shared four or five different appetizers, including jamon iberico (which I put on Catalan tomato bread to make a tasty open-faced sandwich), fried salt cod balls, and anchovies (skipped those!) I ordered something that was described as crayfish-- turns out their web site menu has it right in saying langoustines. I was mildly surprised to see giant non-crawfish on my plate, but they sure did taste good. The food overall was excellent-- everything I had was top-notch. I am now a huge admirer of jamon, which is illegal to import into the US. More's the pity; I know lots of people whom I think would enjoy it.
As always, I have more stuff now than I did when I left home, so I'm in the midst of packing it all for my return tomorrow. BCN-AMS on KL, followed by AMS-DTW on NW, followed by a quiet evening with my family-- I can't wait!
I'm typing this from Danny Bohm's session at IT Forum in Barcelona (he asked me to sit in to help cover Forefront for Exchange questions.) While I have a minute, I wanted to jot down a few of my impressions of Barcelona and IT Forum.
First, if you don't speak Spanish or Catalan, you're probably going to have trouble outside the normal tourist spots. I tried to shop for a Christmas sweater for Arlene yesterday, and it was an equal mix of hilarity and frustration. I can speak pidgin Spanish thanks to my French fluency, but that doesn't help much with people who primarily speak Catalan. Everyone I've encountered has been very friendly, which helps a lot, but before my next visit I'm going to brush up on both languages.
Second, it would be much nicer here if the sun came out. The show is at CCIB, which is right next to the water. It's beautiful, but the overcast and haze remind me a little too much of Seattle. It's been around 60 degrees F, which means that lots of the locals are bundled up in scarves, big jackets, and so forth. (Boots are incredibly common here, both for men and women-- a little surprising.) I'm hoping to see the sun on the water at least once before I leave.
The event itself has been lots of fun. Ask the Experts last night was very well attended, as was my session today; I had probably 250 people (in a room with 300 capacity). It's fun seeing and hearing the variety of attendees, from pretty much every country you can think of in the Western hemisphere. Danny's session is in a big rigid tent that, on the inside, looks like a traditional meeting room. It's nifty.
The event support was great: my speaking room had a clock, a cue box that showed red/yellow/green lights from the staff to indicate my remaining time, and an excellent AV setup. It's much nicer than the setups I'm used to at other Microsoft (and non-Microsoft) events in the US. There are some other aspects of event support that are drastically different here, too, like the snacks (lots and lots and lots of fruit, plus other stuff) and the large designated work areas for attendees (called delegates here).
There's a large mall, the Diagonal Mar centre, right next to the CCIB. I went there shopping yesterday and bought some treats for the kids. I stopped for dinner at Sagardi, but couldn't find even one thing on the menu that sounded appetizing. I hit Canas y Tapas instead and it was OK; I'm not sure what I'll have tonight; I'll post an update sometime between now and the time I get home.
Right now I'm in the Northwest WorldClub at O'Hare, waiting for my KLM flight to Amsterdam (and thence to Barcelona). This show, IT Forum 2007, is the first time I've been invited to present at a Microsoft event in Europe, and the process has been quite a bit different from that of the US shows. The content development process is somewhat different, and the logistics folks have done a very good job of taking care of signup, reservations, and the like. Unfortunately I'll only be there for a very short time, so I won't be able to work in much sightseeing. In order to get an upgraded seat, I had to fly DTW-ORD-AMS-BCN, which isn't exactly convenient. However, I scored seat 1K on my flight, which means I should have a great view of downtown Chicago on the flight out. Counterbalanced against that is the fact that KLM's 747s don't have in-seat power. Since it's Sunday, that's OK, as I won't be working anyway. Tomorrow is another story altogether, though.
and Reflex
were-- that's how bad this book was. Instead of the sensitively drawn Davy Rice, hero of the first two books, we get a bumptious child named Griffin whose parents are killed when unknown attackers attempt to kidnap Griffin. The book follows Griffin's escape and subsequent life, through age 18 or so. The problem is that he never grows up! Rather than the nuanced portrayal of Davy's situation, we get an escapist sequence of chases, thefts, and narrow escapes that seems aimed right at the Alex Ryder demographic (although with a ton of bad language, so my kids won't be reading this!) In the preface to the book, Gould admits that there are some changes from the settings of the previous books and that he hopes readers will give the book a fair shake. I did, and I was still disappointed. Hopefully the movie version is better. Oh wait. That's why this book is so bad. Never mind.
Goonan writes mechanically well, but the story she tells doesn't make any sense. To summarize: Sam Dance, the protagonist, is accosted by a mysterious female physicist who gives him information about a device that can help reduce the human propensity for war, apparently by editing human DNA. Or something. After that, things get worse; there's a lot of pseudo-scientific mumbling about quantum physics and many-worlds theory. Worse still, Dance is a jazz musician, and that leads Goonan to a lot of elaborate descriptions of various jazz-y things. I loathe jazz, so that was a problem too. (Oh, I almost forgot: her dialogue is terrible-- stilted and fake-sounding.) So, not recommended.
In days of yore, Exchange admins had their own conference, the MEC. For some reason I've never completely understood, Microsoft rolled Exchange content in to TechEd, along with developer-focused content and pretty much every other thing you could think of. What started as an admin/IT pro-focused show turned into a giant behemoth that embodied a paradox: every year, it would offer more sessions, and yet the number of sessions relevant to any given topic area tended to decrease!
I'm pretty sure Microsoft heard the screaming, because for the last couple of years their European show, IT Forum, has been split into two separate developer and IT pro events, held on consecutive weeks. I just got a note from my MVP lead announcing that the 2008 US TechEd will have the same split! This is tremendous news because now it means that IT and developer topics won't have to butt heads any longer. I expect dramatic growth in the number of Exchange-focused sessions, which should be great. (Of course, it kind of stinks for the MS folks who now have to spend two consecutive weeks in June in Orlando!)
Despite this change, I expect Exchange Connections to remain the premier Exchange-focused conference. It's a smaller, more focused, and more intimate conference that lets us dive deep into Exchange and UC topics. I'm excited to be chairing the fall 2007 show next week in Vegas and the spring 2008 show in Orlando. See you there!
Courtesy of my Marine mailing list, here's a video of this year's Marine Corps birthday message from Gen James Conway, Commandant of the Marine Corps.
This really isn't a review, because I haven't been able to use WorldMate enough to get a feel for it. The desktop software crashes every time I try to run it, and the handheld software is almost unusable for entering itineraries. It's a far cry from the usability of TravelTracker for the Palm OS. I'm sure the time clock, weather, and flight timetable features are useful for some people, but all I want is the ability to enter flight itineraries and have them end up on my calendar. No such luck.
Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in IBM Lotus Notes, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain knowledge of potentially sensitive information and by malicious people to bypass certain security mechanisms or compromise a user's system.
One of the reported vulns is in the Notes ECL mechanism. I'm really interested to see the details, although these vulns are fixed in 7.0.3 and 8.0.
First, thank goodness for the iPod and its descendants! I love being able to listen to music when I work, when I exercise, or when I'm trapped 37,000 feet above the ground in a hurtling, noisy aluminum tube for four hours.
Second, every time I hear the opening chords of Van Halen's "Beautiful Girls" I break out in a big grin. The song just has such an infectious good-natured energy, neatly separated by the bridge, and David Lee Roth's swagger is a perfect match for the "Hey, hey, where ya going?" at the song's end.
Third, being able to impulse-buy iTunes songs with WiFi on my iPhone is really, really bad. If I'm not careful, I'll blow my yearly entertainment budget on cheesy 80s songs.
Fourth, if you haven't heard the Dirty Funker remixes of GnR's "Welcome to the Jungle" or Metallica's "Enter Sandman", you're missing out.
That's all for now; my favorite song is on! (I kid, I kid; I have lots of favorites.)
I'm still recovering from the Microsoft UC launch-- it was a lot of fun to talk to customers and get their feedback on what Microsoft has done right, and wrong, with OCS 2007. One topic I didn't hear much about was Microsoft's acquisition of Parlano. I think that will be changing, though, once word of this gets out: customers who bought OCS 2007 with Software Assurance will be given no-cost licenses to the Parlano technology in Q1 2008. Future versions of OCS will include Parlano. This is a nice value-add for SA, the kind of thing that Microsoft needs to do more often to sweeten the pot as an SA incentive. (Actually, the best thing they could do to make SA valuable is to cut their release time to <3 years for major releases, so that SA customers actually get upgraded.)
Technorati Tags: OCS 2007, Unified Communications
I'm going to liveblog the Bill Gates/Jeff Raikes keynote when it starts in about an hour; before then, I have a press briefing with some folks from Microsoft's PR agency. I'll update this post when I start liveblogging.
0850: Springsteen's "Radio Nowhere" is playing. Good song; odd choice. Lots of press analyst folks, including Ephraim Schwartz.
0855: Barry University case study video. They're using OCS conferencing to let students attend conferences, replay lectures, etc. They're also using Live Meeting with RoundTable, which is made of win. Followed by funny "VoIP as you are" commercial, followed by Western Digital case study video, emphasizing value of ad-hoc conferencing and ease of configuring/re-configuring.
0858: Shaw Group case study video, plus another commercial, then Tayside Fire and Rescue case study. The fire & rescue folks love presence, and they're rolling out VoIP to speed communications. Gibson Guitar video is next, with background music by Luna Halo (sadly, there's no actual Halo present.)
0905: Fog machine is cranking up, and the case study videos and commercials are replaying.
0918: cool intro video showing manufacturing of a custom MS UC guitar at the Gibson factory, now being played on stage by some guy I don't recognize.
0920: Bill Gates on stage. "What's this all about? Well, Microsoft's all about the magic of software, letting people be more productive and more creative. Today's announcement is all about taking the magic of software and applying it to phone calls." "Flexibility... to do new things isn't there in that structure [PBX structure, he means]"
What factors drive this forward? "Magic of Moore's law" means "hardware is not holding us back at all-- you've seen the explosion of audio and video being an essential part of experiencing the Internet." Digitization of economy. Advances in software.Changes in bandwidth, mobility, and form factor.
Every 10 years or so, how we think of computers and communication changes-- from Altair ("the computer that got me to drop out of school") to IBM PC to laptop to tablet. Similar evolution of phones and mobile devices. Key players in mobile devices have been folks that are great at doing software, not just hardware. In contrast to great evolution in mobile devices, consider the phone you have in your offices. They look pretty much the same. Small display, "lots of buttons-- you look at them and say 'I wonder who uses those buttons?'" Frozen; nothing third parties can do to extend or improve.
Survey: " in 3 people have successfully transferred a phone call." (lots of laughter at this one!) "In the PC world, with things like Exchange and Active Directory... the directory is an important tool in the company and has become mainstream, but the PBX has stood by itself."
"n the older world, everything came in a vertically integrated communications stack."-- hardware, PBX, software all came from one company. "That model worked fine because the pieces worked together.. but it meant that once you picked a PBX partner that was it. Even if they didn't make much money on the initial sale" ongoing support was costly. "For Microsoft, just to set up a new office with a phone was about $700 and required a lead time of a week." (wow! what kind of PBX was that? I don't want one.) How are we changing away from a vertical model? "We've seen this before... it's just like the computer industry before the personal computer came along." Change agents were MS, Intel, and third parties that made it a horizontal market.
Four layers: phones and devices, interoperable apps (based on the directory), open communications software platform, and industry-standard IT architecture. Multiple vendors on each levels. "As you go down the path, at every step there's opportunities for increased productivity and cost savings."
"This shift will be as profound as the shift from typewriters to word processors... which we simply take for granted. Ten years from now, when people think about telephony, when you see a movie that has a desktop phone you'll think 'wow, we used to have those.'"
"We're excited that applications companies, services companies, companies that do great hardware are all coming in here."
"When we think about the cost savings here, you might ask 'how does this add up?'" Productivity benefit; flexibility of conferencing reduces travel; business process where you're collaborating becomes more effective. (this wasn't as much punch as I was expecting-- seemed a little ad-libbed)
0940: Forester looked at all these savings and found "over 500% ROI over three years". Part of the reason "that's so high is that you're leveraging investments you've already made". I mentioned some of the innovations earlier. A good example, both in hardware and software, is RoundTable. Small, light device (it is, but he's not shwoing the dial pad or satellite mics) Costs $3000. Active speaker switching "does a very precise job". Intros Virgin Megastores case study video on RoundTable. Rich media playback, active speaker switching, doc sharing. (all of this uses the Live Meeting console, which works the same way both for Live Meeting and OCS conferencing) This is an area where we've been investing for a number of years... it's a big bet that we've made but we feel great about it." Person who's led that investment and driven the business is Jeff Raikes.
0945: Jeff Raikes on stage. Fifteen months ago, we were here to show our roadmap. Now we're excited to be back to show our products. Announcing the launch of OCS 2007, Office Communicator 2007, a major update to Exchange 2007, Live Meeting, and RoundTable. "These technologies provide the backbone of software-powered communications... it's a big R&D bet for Microsoft."
"The era of dialing blind, the era of phone tag, the era of voice mail jail... that era ends today."
Identity and presence are at the core. "Think of how many phone numbers you have... phone numbers are an artifact of a technological limitation. I don't want to get in touch with your phone number, I want to get in touch with you."
MS research: average information worker spends 37 minutes/week (~ 30 hrs/year) in voice mail jail or playing phone tag. It's not just the lost time that's important, it's what it means in the context of the business.
0951: Eric Swift onstage for demo. Notional sales rep in Chicago wants to check messages to see what he can work on on the way home. Dons headset and calls Outlook Voice Access while Outlook is open on screen. OVA reads new message, then he switches to voice mail. "Let me hear my voice mail", then playback of voice mail message requesting critical response. "Calendar for today" followed by "clear my calendar" to free time. (Some recognition problems, not uncommon in auditoriums with lots of background noise-- I've definitely had varying results in large rooms.) Demo of Outlook Mobile: type-ahead search, plus search of Exchange server catalog. Switch to Communicator Mobile to check presence status. Click-to-call on mobile device to place voice call to co-workers mobile phone.Traffic is congested downtown (should've used Windows Live Search). Goes to work from home, in his backyard with barbecue pit ready to go.
1000: shows creating an IM session from a mail, with the subject line preserved, plus one-click access to item used to start conversation. Then shows escalation directly to voice call. Drag a new participant into the voice call to add them and turn it in to a conference. (audience applauds) "When I deal with vendors I like to look them in the eye", so let's escalate to video.
1005: attending a regularly scheduled Live Meeting from the coffee shop.RoundTable in a meeting room, plus two remote attendees. (Panorama view in Live Meeting console is very cool) show integration from within Word-- person names have a presence jellybean, and you can click-to-call. (applause)
1010: Jeff Raikes back on stage. "not something just for the boardroom or the elite... two orders of magnitude from other solutions. It opens up all of that value for a great communications experience." Harris Interactive/MS study: average information worker gets up to 100 messages a day in 7 different places, up 30% in 18-24 months.SharePoint already has great integration. Dynamics CRM is adding it (that's news to me; I wonder if it's a formal announcement). 150+ customers using OCS/UC in production, 25-30% cost savings reported by them. "Our goal is 50% cost reduction within 3 years." "As of last week, all of Intel-- all 104,000 people-- are using OCS and Office Communicator."
1020: Customer talk: Etienne de Verdelhan, CIO of L'Occitane en Provence, followed by customer video.
1030: Slide with hundreds of logos. "For every dollar of revenue Microsoft makes, we expect our partners to make $3." "To underscore that we have more than 50 partners here announcing new products or services." Nortel, Ericsson, and Mitel are announcing their roadmaps today.
"Nortel has introduced a fully software-based roadmap and plans to build software applications that enhance OCS." "Ericsson has announced a mobility server that will be built on the VoIP call management layer." "Mitel has announced plans for a server that will be built around OCS and help to meet specialized needs in telephony, in particular in small and medium businesses and vertical markets."
SAP is building presence and click-to-communicate into Duet, combining SAP data with rich presence, all available within Office application suite.
I'm off to San Francisco for the Microsoft Unified Communications launch. Should be a fun time!
Technorati Tags: 3sharp, Exchange 2007, OCS 2007, Unified Communications
