It’s not that I’m a professional beta tester and you’re not. It’s that the Outlook Social Connector plug-in utterly and irrevocably destroyed Outlook 2010 Beta on my laptop. As a long-time user of Microsoft products, I know how to repair, reboot, uninstall, reinstall, and all of the other quaint hobbies I’ve become accustomed to since working with Windows 3.1. And indeed, I had to reinstall Office 2010 Beta to get Outlook to function again. So my warning–Do Not Try This At Home–is just so you avoid that headache yourself. However, even without the plug-in actually working, I can see most of the functionality it is intended to provide, and I’m scared by this new push from Microsoft to bring social media directly to my inbox–I don’t necessarily want my professional life to intersect with my personal life.

Google has already experienced the unintended consequences of crossing public/private lines when they dropped Buzz into Gmail and made the assumption that an email contact is the same as a social contact. Ouch. But Microsoft is taking a different approach; they’re not pushing their own micro-blogging product. Known to be early and heavy users of Facebook, the company has decided to partner with the leading social media networks instead. Already LinkedIn, FaceBook, and MySpace are on the list, and I’m sure we can expect more to appear by the time Office 2010 is officially released.

LinkedIn…I get that. A professional networking site seems appropriate for business users. Virtually my entire list of LinkedIn contacts is comprised of colleagues, partners, employees, and bosses–both current and former. I’m also linked in with certain network hubs (those folks with the big and always yellow 500+ next to their name), key people in the industries I follow, and a few friends who happen to work in similar fields or have similar interests. Here’s the point: I don’t mind seeing and being seen in Outlook by these folks. I don’t mind being contacted for business purposes by them. And I don’t mind them have steady access to business-related information about me. All perfectly fine. LinkedIn has proven to be of value to my professional world on a few occasions, and I welcome that partnership.

But Facebook? That’s a different situation for me. I don’t friend business contacts on Facebook, and I try (as in, manually override the default settings each time a new iteration is released…grrrr) to restrict my photos, notes, comments, and other activities on that site just to the folks I’ve selected. Why? Because I don’t really want my professional contacts to see videos of my children, comments from my mother and siblings, photos of me in Middle School (especially that), or the status updates I post during a bout of insomnia. I tried creating a second Facebook profile–one that I would use just for work-related content–but my friends and family all started adding it as well. Fortunately for me, I never got into MySpace, so it poses no worries.

On the flipside, I try not to bring my personal life in to work too much. For example, I use Twitter strictly for a professional audience, and I don’t Tweet about what I ate for breakfast. Until I actually started using Twitter I didn’t believe people actually did that. I heard jokes about it, but I didn’t believe it was true. In fact, quite a few people do. And much more mundane and uninteresting details that flow through the twittosphere round the clock. Thoughtless updates are like those rose-in-bloom-under-a-pretty-rainbow animated GIF email signatures all of us used to endure, and hopefully they’ll also fade with time.

My Outlook inbox is already so bloated that I have to create archived PST files about once a quarter. When I travel, I have to work nights and weekends to catch up on email. When I vacation, I bring my laptop and smartphone to stay caught up. All this to say I don’ t need more unnecessary information in my inbox. Microsoft’s position on your privacy with these integrations is this: “if you choose to restrict profile access on a given network, the OSC will respect that privacy.” Prepare for the embarrassing deluge of unintended public access among your business contacts. This could get ugly. I love the idea of integrating LinkedIn with Outlook, but please, Microsoft, keep the breakfast burritos and sausage links out of my work life.

Oh, and if you still want to Try This At Home, Microsoft has posted a workaround for the Outlook Social Connector. It’s just a couple of uninstalls and reinstalls, plus one reboot. Nothing a seasoned Window’s users can’t handle.

With every new technology, we see a honeymoon phase followed by the reality check. Think back to the dot-com boom of the late nineties and the subsequent bust when everyone was building a web presence and a web business because, well, it was the web. Web 1.0. The information web. Machines talking to people. We were madly in love with it. These new businesses had to be valuable because they were on the web. Some were; many weren’t. It was tautological. Web = Web Presence = Web Business. But where was the value? Once reality set in, we saw the difference: Amazon.com flourished; Pets.com flopped.

Now we’re seeing a similar trend in Web 2.0. The collaborative web. People talking to people. Social media is the big buzz, and we’re told that we have to be involved in order to survive. Get your company on Twitter, and start tweeting to your customers. Create a presence on Facebook and build a ‘fan’ base. Put your company profile on LinkedIn. Use tools that allow you to post to all three simultaneously because you can’t miss out on this important development. Get with the new media or you’ll perish. Setup a company wiki, crowd source your product, get everyone on IM.

To be sure, there is much to be gained through social media, both in the business realm and for us personally. To find it, I always ask where’s the value? Are you really connecting with your customers and employees in a meaningful way when you tweet a couple of sentences about some new announcement? Are you building a lasting relationship there? Is your Facebook page just FYI, or are you using it as an effective tool with some larger game in mind? This honeymoon will soon end, and we’ll all realize that being social is not nearly as important as being meaningfully social.

And already the next trend is starting to catch on–Web 3.0. The real-time web. Machines talking to machines. Our screens are starting to pop constantly with new information and ideas as web services feed live data to all sorts of interconnected pages and APIs. We are becoming our own news desk, pouring over raw information and trying to get a sense of events as they unfold. I recently used Google’s live Twitter results feed to monitor a local election, and I found out the winners well before any news service announced them. We’re seeing less mitigation, less analysis, more action, more reaction. Businesses certainly have already taken advantage of web services in order to gain the real-time edge. And on the social side, TweetDeck does a great job of aggregating live updates and posts—so much so that it feels overwhelming at times. Most of us already have some sort of an internet connection with us at all times, and now mobile broadband is arriving to the masses who can’t afford an iPhone.

I have to say, I’ve been ogling Google’s Nexus One ‘Web Phone,’ I can’t wait to use an iPad, the Windows and Android tablets are on their way, and the preview videos of Microsoft’s Courier leave me drooling. I’m already dreaming about the honeymoon.

But what is does say to Unified Communications is that devices are 1) continuing to converge, and 2) becoming more humane. As working minds, we weren’t really tethered to office desks until the typewriter became a mainstay. Then they transformed into PCs, and now we have dockable laptops and/or separate netbooks. None of these options really fit the fluidity of a body in motion, shifting from one context/environment to another.  Smartphones come close because they’ve evolved into mini-PCs that are ultraportable, but you still can’t get much work done on them. Even browsing a webpage can be quite a challenge on small devices.

The first time I held a friend’s iPhone, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, this would be perfect if it were just a little bigger.” Meaning, I wouldn’t need a laptop and a cellphone any longer. I wouldn’t need a physical keyboard or a separate monitor. I wouldn’t need a separate zipper compartment in my backpack to carry it around. Instead, it would fit into my lifestyle without me needing to adapt to it. Just a single, slim device that could do everything: phone, apps, movies, internet, e-mail, games, music, and photos.

Okay, the iPad can’t do all of that…yet. Give it a year or so. Watch its competitors launch similar devices. Watch us all start to shed the extra weight of technology and move from situation to situation without checking battery life, undocking, wrapping up cables, or even thinking about a wi-fi connection. You’ll be checking your morning news and e-mail over coffee, driving to work with a Bluetooth headset, stepping into an early meeting, flipping through some family photos at lunch, giving an afternoon presentation, filing a report, stepping onto an airplane and watching a movie–all without switching devices or giving a second thought to the technology required.

So what does the iPad mean to Unified Communications? It means things are still getting simpler and more portable. Devices and applications must evolve to do both effortlessly.

Chris Sullivan is the Director of Training and Documentation for AVST and also on the CallXpress Customer Advisory Council.

CallXpress 8 has been out for just a short time, and already I’m hearing rave reviews from our students and end-users about the breadth and quality of enhancements we’ve made to the product. No doubt Speech sparks the most interests in our classes, as students can’t wait to start playing around with the speech-enabled call processors and the voice recognition. We now train Speech in our Administrator and Core Technical courses, rather than separately like we did for the previous version. So if you’ve been wanting to see Speech in action and learn more about it, get signed up for one or both of those courses.

Also new to CallXpress 8 Training is our FastTrack course, which is designed to bring reseller technicians up to speed on the changes since version 7. A passing score on the accompanying exam allows students to become certified on CallXpress 8.

Please note: the FastTrack course is recommended only for reseller technicians who are already certified on version 7. A current certification is required in order to become recertified.

The course is broken out into seven lessons:

1. Introduction to CallXpress 8
2. Upgrading from 7.91 to 8
3. Understanding the new Interface
4. Working with Speech
5. Devices and Availability
6. Multi-Server Configuration
7. Upgrading from Web PhoneManager

So far, we’ve had a few hundred technicians take advantage of this course. If you haven’t enrolled yet, please download the latest training registration form from PartnerXpress and send it in!

New to CallXpress 8 Documentation we have a number of items:

• CallXpress Editable Pocket Guide – created as a request from our end-user community, this tri-fold document covers the telephone user interface menu. It’s delivered in Microsoft Word to allow you to make your own customizations and edits as you see fit.
• Voice User Interface QRC – with Speech integrated into CallXpress, this quick reference card shows the most common commands.
• Mailbox Archive Utility OLB – this online book explains how to backup and maintain mailboxes in CallXpress
• System Backup and Restore OLB – this online book covers everything you need to know to keep your CallXpress system backed up and safe.
• CallXpress Automatic Speech Recognition Guide – this guide covers everything related to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), including concepts, licensing, requirements, installation, and troubleshooting.

And as always, we’ve updated and rewritten many of the legacy documents to address the numerous enhancements in CallXpress 8. If you have any comments, questions, or recommendations for our Training or Documentation, please send me an e-mail.

Related Links:

• CallXpress Online Technical Training Datasheet
• CallXpress End User Materials

In the following 3 1/2 minute video blog, Adam gives viewers a sneak peak at the newly designed Web PhoneManager (WPM) in CallXpress 8.  You’ll definitely want to check it out and watch as Adam highlights the cool new availability settings included in CX8.

What is Web PhoneManager?
WPM allows subscribers to manage their mailboxes through their preferred web browser, through the company’s intranet or possibly from outside the office through an Internet connection. This web-based utility is available through any web browser that has access to the server on which it resides. Within WPM, subscribers can also create and update name and greeting recordings for their mailboxes, and send new voice messages.

CallXpress 8 Web PhoneManager
With the release of CallXpress 8, WPM has been greatly enhanced with JavaScript/AJAX support for much improved usability when managing messages. Also, playback of messages using streaming audio has been changed to use MP3 audio through Adobe Flash Player for faster playback, greater browser and operating system compatibility, and greatly simplified installation and configuration.