A call to power

Mention the name ‘Microsoft’ in a group of people and a litany of remarks will erupt, ranging from evil to good marketers to buggy software to the world’s most widely-used software applications. Whether we have a love or hate relationship with this company, it is clear that Microsoft holds a unique position of power in any market it chooses to compete.

Simply stating that Microsoft is entering any particular market makes decision-makers at all levels take note and investigate solutions the company promises to offer. Within the telecom market, Microsoft has thus far generated a lot of discussion, but it has had little real impact as the company’s initial efforts were focused on free consumer instant messaging coupled with good, but kludgy, point-to-point voice and video over IP. Until recently, telephony product sales have not been impacted nor influenced by Microsoft’s minor presence in the market. For most companies, Microsoft’s second foray into the IP communications market, the purchase of Placeware’s web conferencing assets, now branded Microsoft Live Meeting, temporarily piqued interest and raised eyebrows, but again had little real impact.

As we move into 2006 and beyond, the market dynamics are changing such that every telephony end user and every vendor will ultimately be impacted, at least to some extent, by Microsoft. The fact is that the migration to IP telephony is disrupting the market in such a way that nearly every PBX vendor is being pressured to promote applications that will integrate with voice (either IP or TDM). The key to this integration and to the applications themselves is software. In analyst briefings by Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, Siemens and many others, all have publicly stated that they are becoming software companies. This transition puts these vendors squarely in the headlights of the biggest and most aggressive software company on the planet – Microsoft.

Microsoft’s strategy
Microsoft’s real-time communications strategy is to provide the business marketplace with a fully integrated portfolio of software and services enabling real-time communication and collaboration capabilities that allow people to work more effectively together. This strategy focuses on providing presence-based, multi-modal communications and collaborative workspaces, targeting most common business processes in order to allow instant and highly contextual collaboration.

What this means is that Microsoft is developing a formidable desktop collaboration product suite based on presence with APIs for integrating with enterprise IP telephony systems. Out of the box, Microsoft’s products deliver presence and status, instant messaging, point-to-point IP voice and video, web conferencing, data sharing, whiteboarding, and collaborative workspaces. These products also provide complementary components including comprehensive directory services, authentication and authorisation, encrypted messaging, server and database capability, and federation to allow communication and collaboration between organisations.

Live communications server: at the heart of Microsoft’s solution
Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 (LCS) is at the heart of Microsoft’s real-time enterprise collaboration solution. LCS provides a scalable, enterprise platform for presence awareness and instant messaging based on industry standards SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and SIMPLE (SIP IM and Presence Leveraging Extensions).

LCS 2005 is designed as a premise-based solution; however, service providers may optionally offer LCS capabilities as a hosted service. In addition to sharing presence and instant messaging internally, LCS 2005’s federation feature allows organizations to optionally exchange presence and IM information with remote users and trusted business customers, partners, and suppliers in other companies. LCS 2005 may also be federated with public IM services like MSN, Yahoo! and AOL. Because of its built-in encryption capabilities, mobile employees can connect with the LCS server and receive it’s presence and IM benefits over the Internet without the need for a VPN. LCS’s archival capability allows enterprises to maintain legal compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (financial services), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and other regulatory measures.

Integrating telephony presence and call control with LCS
Two universal workflow devices used by all information workers are the telephone and the computer, yet for most workers, the phone and the computer remain separate and unintegrated. For example, most presence systems really show only whether someone is at the computer or away, but they provide no indication about the status of the other key workflow tool, the telephone, and whether or not someone is using it. A very common instant message is, “ru there?” which is often followed by, “May I call u?” The ability to easily escalate a chat conversation to a voice conversation is critical – yet to do so usually requires the information worker to move from the computer as the workflow tool to the telephone as the workflow tool.

A completely new communications paradigm emerges that can significantly accelerate business processes when telephony presence is integrated into the computer’s presence/IM system and workflow applications. Telephony presence shows off-hook/on-hook status for all of an information worker’s telephony devices, including the desk phone, PC soft phone, and the user’s mobile phone. Sharing telephone off-hook/on-hook status doubles the presence content and user state information and provides one critical integration link between the telephone and the computer.

Call control is the second critical telephone-computer integration link required to fully achieve a voice-enabled collaborative environment. Call control implies that through the computer interface users are able to place phone calls on hold, transfer calls, mute calls, and place calls into conference. As one considers the need to accelerate the knowledge chain and effectively collaborate with geographically dispersed colleagues, suppliers, labor sources, and management, a number of significant feature enhancements and benefits become readily available when telephony presence and call control are integrated into a collaborative communications product like Microsoft Office Live Communication Server (LCS) and the Microsoft Office Communicator client.

Connecting in ways you could never connect before
Once Live Communication Server is integrated with the company voice system, which typically consists of one or more PBXs spread throughout the organization, new and useful capabilities that information workers need and want become readily available.

Telephony presence – Combining both computer and telephony presence within LCS allows users to visually monitor whether a contact is using the PC and/or whether the colleague’s telephone is on-hook or off-hook. This information helps users avoid placing a phone call when it is obvious that the other person is already using the telephone. It reduces the time both parties might spend unnecessarily creating and/or listening to voice mail. Users are also able to monitor when a contact’s telephone presence has changed to on-hook, which allows them to call the colleague when he or she becomes available.

Click-To-Dial – Click-to-dial is a capability that allows users to dial any person in their contact list with the click of the mouse. The call instructions are sent to the PBX which automatically calls out to either the desk phone or the Communicator soft client, depending upon which is configured to receive calls. Click-to-dial functionality is enabled in the Communicator client, Outlook, other MS Office applications like Word and Excel, and in SharePoint.

Within the Communicator client, contact lists are used to show presence and status information for those people one communicates with regularly. However, there are often times when individuals need to communicate with people in the organisation who are not on their contact list. To facilitate these less frequent communications needs, Communicator integrates with three address books: Outlook, Active Directory, and Microsoft Windows Address Book. Communicator has a powerful search capability embedded with in it to search this combined directory to find the presence and status of individuals in the organisation that are not on the contact list.

In the Communicator interface window is the word ‘Find’ and a text box, as shown in the figure below. By entering characters into this text box, Communicator automatically searches the entire contact database directory for the name. Searching is done as each character in the name is typed, allowing very fast search and retrieval capability.

Once Communicator has made a match, the presence and status information is displayed for that person. All of Communicator’s capabilities to reach out and communicate with that person are enabled by clicking on the name with the mouse.

Escalate an IM to a Phone Call – When chatting with a person using IM, the IM session can be instantly escalated to an audio call with a simple click on a phone icon in the IM conversation window.

Call Control – From the Communicator client interface, users are able to place a phone call, put a call on hold, transfer a call, add multiple parties to the call (conference calling), and hang-up.

Click-to-Conference – Communicator supports two ways to enable a multiparty phone call: using the PBX’s internal bridging capability, or using a service provider’s bridge.

Many PBXs have the capability to support between three-party and eight-party calls. When the PBX is integrated with LCS, users can click the telephone button to join additional parties to a call; in this instance the PBX’s own audio bridging capability can be used.

Alternatively, if an enterprise has an audio conferencing account with BT, InterCall, or MCI, the IT administrator can modify a setting in Active Directory to enable the audio conferencing icon in Communicator. Clicking on the group audio conferencing icon will send an instant message to each participant’s Conversation Window inviting the person to an audio conference. When a participant accepts the invitation, the audio conferencing bridge dials out to that individual automatically.

Setup and Status on Forwarded Calls – LCS users are able to create personalized rules for forwarding calls from their desktop phones or Communicator soft client to a remote office or site, a mobile phone, or to voice mail when they expect to be out of the office. Users also can check the status of call forwarding and change it remotely.

Set Do Not Disturb (DND) – DND is automatically set based on an individual’s activities, and it can be integrated with the telephone and the computer. For example, when a phone handset lifts, the user’s presence status can automatically be set to do not disturb. Similarly, when a person goes into slide show mode in PowerPoint, Communicator can set the user’s presence status to DND. DND can be configured, based on personal rules, to send calls to voicemail or to allow important calls to come through based on the caller’s ID. Incoming calls are automatically checked against these rules and are routed appropriately.

Receive Caller Pop-Up Notification – When a call arrives, the user is notified who is calling through a pop-up window called toast.

Call Pivoting – Users are able to monitor incoming calls (through pop-up toast) and transfer these calls to a telephony device of their choice such as a home phone, mobile phone, hotel DID phone, etc.

Winning at Telephone Tag - Communicator allows users to set a notification option so that when a contact the user needs to communicate with becomes available, the user is automatically notified. By right clicking on a contact’s name in the contact list, a menu will appear with the option “Tag Contact.” Once the presence status for this contact changes to Online, an alert is displayed on the user’s workstation in the form of a notification toast. Tagged contacts remain tagged, and users are notified every time the status changes to Online, until tagging is turned off for that person.

Missed Call Notification via E-Mail – Users can create a rule that will send an e-mail message to Outlook whenever a call is missed. This message will contain the phone number of the caller and the name of the caller, if the caller ID matches a phone number in the user’s contact list. This way, users on the road can keep track of who called, even if the caller did not leave a voice message.

Mobility – Mobile users are able to experience all of the benefits mentioned above when using a PDA running Windows CE or a RIM device. Microsoft has ported the Communicator client to run on these devices, providing mobile users with the same interface and controls they would experience on their computer.

Federation - Federation is the capability to securely connect an enterprise’s LCS deployment to LCS deployments in other organizations. Federation allows users to add people from partner, supplier, and customer companies to their contact list and to share presence and instant messages with them. Federating allows enterprises to flatten and accelerate their knowledge chains by enabling rapid collaboration between information workers in partner companies.

Clearly, many real and significant benefits emerge for knowledge workers when the enterprise telephony system is fully integrated with Live Communication Server.

Bottom-Line Business Impact
Telephony-enabling LCS has a number of quantifiable and soft savings for enterprises. Among the bottom-line savings organizations can see and measure are the following:

•Reduction of external audio conference bridge expenses. The majority of multi-party audio calls involve a small number of people (typically three of four). Most PBXs can support this number of parties natively. When LCS is integrated with the PBX, multiple parties can be easily added to a call using the Communicator client interface. Savings are achieved when these conference calls are bridged by the PBX instead of using an external audio bridge, which averages around US$0.09 per minute for unattended calls and US$0.25 per minute for attended calls per participant.

• Mobile phone minutes have become an out-of-control expense for many organizations. Overage charges for mobile phone long distance can cost as much as US US$0.75/minute. With LCS integrated into the PBX, users can see when colleagues are online, and then call using the desktop phone or the Communicator client. In addition, if a worker is at home or in a hotel, calls can be routed to the local phone instead of having people deplete their mobile phone minutes.
• Because LCS can be integrated with nearly any traditional PBX, enterprises can choose when they want to migrate to IP voice. As enterprises traverse the upgrade path to IP, investments in traditional systems can be fully depreciated before upgrading. Note that the cost of upgrading to IP voice can range from a few hundred dollars to nearly US$1000 per line.

Enterprises also can achieve significant productivity gains using a voice-enabled LCS system. Some of these benefits include:

• Reduced phone tag and voice messaging because employees can see each other’s presence and can contact one another when both are available.
• Decreased time to get key information to others using presence and IM, and click-to-call dialing.
• More rapid response to colleagues and customers as messages can be sent via e-mail to a mobile device showing when a call on the office phone has been missed.
• The ability to search e-mail for important voice messages versus going through messages one-by-one sequentially using traditional voice messaging.
• Telephone and presence integration with common workflow tools like Outlook, MS Office applications, and SharePoint.

Conclusion
Microsoft has developed a formidable product array in the converged communications marketplace. When call control is enabled within LCS, knowledge workers are able to rapidly communicate and collaborate with others, both within and without the enterprise, in ways that were never possible before. By telephony enabling Live Communication Server, many of the Microsoft workflow applications including Outlook, Word, and Excel, as well as the SharePoint group collaboration portal, automatically provides telephony presence and call control capability. Integrating a PBX into Live Communication Server requires a SIP-to-CSTA gateway, and several Microsoft partners have created middleware to assist in this integration. A voice-enabled LCS system can provide quantifiable bottom-line savings along with significant soft savings.

Microsoft’s capabilities, combined with those of its telephony partners, present a compelling fully-featured IP telephony and collaborative application suite. Moving forward, enterprises would be remiss if they did not at least consider a telephony-enabled Live Communications Server implementation as a way to significantly flatten and accelerate the flow of knowledge in their organisation.