| Microsoft Sees Billion Users for Phone, Web Programs March 24 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. vying with Cisco Systems Inc. for business-phone customers, predicts more than a billion people will use software that combines Internet-calling features with messaging and video within three years. Microsoft has more than 100 million customers making calls using its Office software, Gurdeep Singh Pall, vice president of the company’s Unified Communications group, said in an interview. Microsoft will release a new version of software for Internet telephony and corporate instant messaging this year, said Pall, who speaks today at a conference in Orlando, Florida. SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Web Apps: Better Than Google Apps? As the upcoming releases of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 draw closer, I’ve been highlighting some of the best new features that will be available this spring. This time, I’ll show you a very exciting feature that will allow your end users to work on their Office documents in a zero-client environment from within SharePoint 2010. When Google unleashed Google Docs to the world in 2007, they made it very clear to consumers that being able to create and edit documents from the web is very cool. And not only can you just create documents for viewing later, but you can easily share those documents with others so they can edit them too. Clearly, Microsoft missed the train on this one, as they were still trying to sell Live as a compelling online experience, and it had none of these features. Microsoft is offering its first public glimpse of Office Communications Server 14, its all-in-one instant messaging/VOIP/conferencing product at the VoiceCon show in Orlando on March 24. Office Communications Server 14 — which I’ve heard will be called Office Communications Server 2010 when it ships in the latter part of this year — is going to be tightly integrated with SharePoint Server 2010 and Exchange Server 2010, as I’ve reported previously. Microsoft officials reconfirmed today that OCS 14 is going to ship before the end of this year. From some of the new screen shots supplied by Microsoft of OCS 14, it looks like social-networking is going to become more pervasive in Office Communicator, the client component of the product. Microsoft is adding location auto-detection, activity feeds, and integrated skill-search functionality to the next release of OCS.
Moving applications to a cloud service is a disruption to any business, but in Ron Markezich's experience as Microsoft's VP of Online Services, a well executed cloud migration can redefine a company. Here are three best practices he's gleaned from Microsoft's largest BPOS customers, including Coca-Cola and GlaxoSmithKline. "When a new CEO came in the CIO said we need to change the culture here, we need to get off Lotus Notes and get out of the old world," says Markezich. Even before they deployed BPOS, there was a marketing campaign within GlaxoSmithKline — called "Be a Leader, Not a Follower" — to emphasize the change that BPOS could bring. It was marketed as not just a new productivity tool, but a culture change where users can get at e-mail from any Internet connection, blog and use wikis inside the company, and connnect with partners through social networking tools. "But it took a mandate from the CEO for this movement to work," says Markezich. "They made it a business and culture initiative instead of just an IT initiative." Microsoft’s response to the microblogging phenomenon has officially arrived. OfficeTalk, a Microsoft Office Labs experiment, attempts to squeeze in next to solutions like Twitter by allowing employees to collaborate and share their thoughts on a 140 character limit. Much like a Yammer and Twitter mashup, OfficeTalk has all the features you'd expect from such a solution: - 140 character limit
- Profiles
- Follow option
- Search
- Threaded conversations
The tool, which Microsoft has been internally testing, is reportedly one of the company's most popular unreleased solutions. The official Microsoft blog states that OfficeTalk has had more than 10,000 visitors and sees hundreds of messages posted daily. But the catch is that it's on-premise service, and, considering how popular the cloud is, are those numbers really enough to shake anything up? |