4 Reasons Why Microsoft Will Shift The Business Productivity Paradigm #ucoms

Today is the official launch of Lync, Microsoft’s powerful integrated enterprise communication platform. It’s been a longtime coming, I can’t wait for it to be widely adopted and becomes mainstream in the enterprise.
Today is the official launch of Lync, Microsoft’s powerful integrated enterprise communication platform. It’s been a longtime coming, I can’t wait for it to be widely adopted and becomes mainstream in the enterprise.

Why am I thrilled about it? Well, coupled with existing Microsoft technologies namely: SharePoint, Exchange and Office (collectively known as Microsoft Unified Communications and Collaboration aka #ucoms), it will revolutionize and enhance how we work on a daily basis. Here are 4 reasons why I think Microsoft will shift the business productivity paradigm:

I had the opportunity to experience the goodness of #ucoms at the Microsoft Experience Center last September 2010 and there are so many capabilities that I saw that would make my daily work much more efficient. For example:

– Let’s say I am stuck in a lunch meeting and I left my mobile phone at the office. I can use the restaurant’s landline phone to call my voicemail and through voice commands, reschedule my next meeting. Automatically my colleagues will get the meeting reschuled updated on their calendars.

– How often do you start a conversation with a colleague in an email, then continue it over instant messaging (IM)? 4 weeks later, you’re trying to track down what was discussed. With #ucoms, the conversation that happened both in an email thread and IM can be retrieved in an aggregated view.

Check out this video with some of the other benefits I experienced with #ucoms:

We can do much better than relying primarily on e-mail as our collaboration tool in the enterprise. With the combination of other #ucoms technology, the business scenarios are endless with how team collaboration can be greatly improved. Check out this video on how people can better work together:

How much do organizations spend on investing and maintaining various productivity, communication and collaboration tools? Wouldn’t it be great if these technologies can be streamlined and consolidated in related platforms? Some benefits that organizations can gain are:

– Reduced costs in technical infrastructure (hardware, software, licensing, etc)

– Standardized human resource skillsets and processess (how oten do you have to keep up with release management standards in your organization because you have disparate technologies?)

– Potentially leverage information across varying communication and collaboration medium (wouldn’t it be great if a business user enters data in a spreadsheet and it can be displayed on a collaboration website WITHOUT developing specialized connectors or APIs?)

– Organizational adoption will be less of an issue since most of these are based on familiar tools (ie Office, Windows, Outlook, SharePoint, etc)

One of the key arguments around leveraging these Microsoft technologies is the organizational investment around technical infrastructure and human resources. This is a valid point especially for small to medium size organizations that can’t justify in spending for these tools.

I’m excited to tell you that this is not the case anymore with the soon to be launched Office 365 – starting at $6/month per user, organizations can leverage Office, SharePoint, Lync and Exchange without investing in their own infrastructure. That’s HUGE! That means you don’t have to deal with installations, maintenance, patch updates especially if IT is not your core business.

So what do you think? Are you looking forward to what’s coming with Microsoft Unified Communications and Collaboration suite of tools? Let me know!