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.

I recently attended Exchange 2010 Ignite training. Three days of test driving the latest and greatest iteration of Microsoft’s email system. It’s quite an impressive product, loaded with new functionality and redesigned for unbelievable degree of robustness. While there I spent some time exploring something near and dear to my heart, their implementation of Unified Messaging (UM).  It was great to learn a bit about deploying Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging in the context of a legacy voicemail replacement – an area where I spent a considerable amount of time.

The last slide of the last lecture had a fascinating bullet point – “A  Natural Replacement for Legacy Voicemail”. What you’ll find while comparing a legacy voicemail to Exchange is that a lot of those “Legacy Features” such as voice distribution lists and cascading pager notifications are missing. This may not be a huge deal, since your company may not use them anyhow. However, it suffices to say that it’s not a voicemail system but an implementation of voice into a more email mail centric system. It’s a tradeoff -  legacy functionality for more a more modern feature set. Assuming  of course that you want those new features and can live without the legacy ones such as voice mail networking with legacy systems via VPIM or AMIS or replacing a familiar telephone user interface (TUI) with an unusual version.

Upgrading to Exchange 2010 requires a fork lift upgrade. There is no process to upgrade your existing 2003 or 2007 systems. However,  Exchange 2010 is 2003 and 2007 capable. Meaning, you can have both 2003 and 2007 systems in your Exchange 2010 enterprise. So you don’t upgrade, you add the new system then move the users over . Although you can go right from 2007 to 2010 in controlled manner,  you cannot upgrade your 2007 UM though, only move those users.

One thing I found vexing in both 2007 and now again in 2010 Unified Messaging is how tedious it is to manage voice features for an Exchange user. Although the management interface has been streamlined and improved I found it tough  to go back and view or make changes once I set up a voice user. Near as I could figure, I could enable or disable UM for a user, anything else, I’d have to use a wizard again.

The last two criticisms I have deal with Speech. Speech recognition is a processor intensive function, not only on Exchange but on a CallXpress system as well. Speech also has a few subtleties that one should think about in an administration context (Hence, it makes sense to be able to make user changes easy). Take name changes for instance. What happens when “Holly Holt” gets married and now is Holly Smythe, only pronounced “Smith”. What if she wants her old name, her new name, and maybe “Holly Holt-Smythe” as well? We can do this. We can also handle both Holly Smythe and Olly Smith by a few tweaks in administration. By the way, I asked that exact question in the class.

I got the reaction I probably deserved by asking such a thing at 4PM on a Friday. I’ll blame it on that rather than any product deficiencies. I spent  a bit of time trying to explore this further on the web and couldn’t land anywhere that described sizing, speech recognition, and disambiguation.

MS Exchange 2010 also supports Speech to Text. The caller leaves a voicemail message, and Exchange converts it to a text email. Very slick. We’ve had that with our “got-voice” integration for some time. We were given what I’d describe as an oblique warning that this is processor intensive and we shouldn’t give it to every user. Suffices to say, too much of a good thing here is probably a bad thing. I couldn’t find much info anywhere on that either, other than everyone agreeing it was cool. I’m guessing that since I’ve heard that it’s speech to text transcription accuracy is less than 50%, the more users added means the less likely the messages will be transcribed properly.

Not that I’m trying to be mean, these two features are very cool. There are, however, a lot of problems that pop up during speech deployment. CallXpress has the tools to deal with these issues and without making light of the complexities, they are pretty straight forward.

Make no mistake, it’s a cool system with lots of other cutting edge features such as Rights Management, Exchange Online (Cloud access),  a very cool new look and feel to both Outlook and OWA, and awesome high availability and archiving capability. The way Microsoft has redesigned the architecture, with it’s resulting many-fold increase in hardware efficiency, probably makes the upgrade worthwhile.

However, Unified Messaging was disappointing. With it’s ability to integrate to all versions of Exchange (2010 soon to come, no doubt) CallXpress allows you to add UM capabilities as awesome and rich as these new features while at the same time providing true legacy voicemail replacement and continuity during an upgrade.

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.

UCConnect is a Microsoft® .NET development framework (SDK) for CallXpress 8 used to create custom UC solutions including call processing applications, notification and alerting applications, and other customer or vertical market-specific information access and delivery applications commonly referred to as Communication-Enabled Business Processes, or CEBP.

Access to UCConnect is limited to members of AVST’s new Developer Network (full program launching Q1/2010).

To join the AVST Developer Network, complete this online form and an AVST representative will contact you with full program details. For more information, please contact AVST at ucconnect@avst.com.

• Full Program Launching Q2/2010 – Register now and be the first to reap the benefits:
• FREE to join for developers, customers, resellers, technology partners and consultants
• Utilizes Microsoft .NET development tools to create custom UC applications for CallXpress 8
• Downloadable code samples
• Training – tips and tricks + online training videos
• Developer’s community to share ideas

Click here to learn more about the AVST Developer Network.

If you are charged with researching a replacement solution for your first‐generation voicemail system, make sure you KNOW YOUR OPTIONS!

Look for a replacement to your current voicemail system that offers a flexible solution for integrating, automating and improving your business processes. CallXpress was built to achieve maximum return on investment by:

• Minimizing training by mimicking the Telephone User Interface (TUI) of your Nortel Meridian Mail, Octel Aria, Octel Serenade, and other popular first generation voicemail systems
• Leveraging the global administration capabilities of the CallXpress platform to reduce administrative cost
• Automating information delivery accessible to customers 24 x 7
• Allowing for customized IVR applications such as bank by phone, financial reporting, campus directory, 24-hour technical support line, and employee locator
• Providing notification to customers of timely information
• Intelligent routing of calls
• Streamlining message management through unified messaging

Related Links:

• AVST On-Demand Webcast – CallXpress 8 – Ideal Legacy Voicemail Replacement Solution
• Datasheet – CallXpress Legacy Voicemail Replacement
• Nortel Investment Protection Program Resource Library

Here’s an excerpt from Denny’s video blog:

Suppose you are in a meeting and you are expecting a very important voicemail. You know you can’t call in to retrieve the message because you are in a meeting, but you can read it on your Blackberry or iPhone or other device.  Just having that alone saves you time than having to go back to your voicemails and read it. The other thing, that is interesting about it, is that some people never get to the point in a voicemail, so you’re listening for maybe minutes before they get to the point. With text you can simply look at the message and scan right to the most important piece of information, and you are there.  You’re done. It transforms the way people shave time and be more efficient.

Click on the play button below to watch the entire video.

Related Links:

• AVST Enhances CallXpress with Speech-to-Text blog post
• AVST Enhances Speech-to-Text Technology from GotVoice press release
• GotVoice Enterprise Solutions Datasheet

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

What is Digital Networking?

Digital networking is an advanced CallXpress application that allows telephony servers to exchange voice and fax  messages over any network based on the TCP/IP protocol—a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), or the Internet.

Digital Networking allows you to combine a number of CallXpress servers into a single, coordinated messaging system that serves an entire enterprise. Easy to view progress bars keep you updated when activity is underway between the master server and other nodes in the network.

In his second video blog documentary, Chris Sullivan interviews software engineers, Timothy Blaisdell and Bill Matzen to get an inside look at how Digital Networking works.

Related Articles

• Solution Brief: CallXpress for Large and Multi-Site Enterprises
• Press Release: Manatee County Expands Deployment of CallXpress® to Support Network Disaster Recovery Strategy