Microsoft recently announced their Exchange 2010 beta and the interesting thing is that there does not seem to be a single ‘wow’ feature in there. It actually brought to mind Barack Obama’s slogan against John McCain in their presidential race: ‘more of the same’.
The best features that the Microsoft Exchange team could come up were [...]

Preface: Unison does not compete very directly with Nortel (they are enterprise and we are SMB) and they have many divisions beyond their enterprise solutions group.
Today’s bankruptcy filing to me exemplifies the shifts and extinctions that the tech industry so often brings about. While Nortel’s unified communications partner, Microsoft, storms ahead with software-based unified communications, [...]

Talking with Clint Boulton at eWeek, he mentioned that he is inundated with pitches about ‘unified communications’ (UC) from a wide variety of very different companies, with very different solutions.
So, I thought I’d write my own perspective to try to clarify. There are basically 4 different ‘flavors’ of UC offering:

1. The software platforms like Unison [...]

Answer: when it is a cut-down hosted version from Microsoft that cannot do unified communications.
Microsoft this week launched its “Microsoft Online Services Suite” or MOSS, not to be confused with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (also known as MOSS). Oh, and try to forget that SharePoint Online, a cut-down version of MOSS (the server) is included [...]

Walking around VoiceCon last week, I encountered many different visions of ‘unified communications,’ with two basic schools of thought:
•        The PBX vendors were selling add-on software that more or less hooked in to Microsoft Exchange – and their definition of unified communications was ‘telephony plus a bit of integration’.
•        The software guys, like Microsoft and [...]

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Interesting move from Cisco this morning, when it announced its ‘collaboration’ lineup. To me, it does not address the elephant in the room: what to do about MS Outlook and Exchange?
Sure, Cisco has has been buying some firms like PostPath (an Exchange 2003 replacement) and Jabber, the instant messaging company. But the fact is, [...]