Dial by Name,
Not by Number
Most people use DNS names to find computers
on the Internet. Sure, you could use IP
addresses, but the whole point of having the
DNS system is to have a namespace that’s
easier to use. That raises the legitimate question
of why we have to use telephone numbers
to reach people! For example, on most modern
cell phones you can dial a contact by name
or by voice. However, that capability is useful
only if you have the right phone number in the
first place, which is where having a single standardized
enterprise directory (AD in this case)
comes in handy. Assuming you provision your
directory well, your users’ contact numbers will
be available so that you can use the dial-byname
functionality in Exchange 2007’s Outlook
Voice Access (OVA) and various OCS clients.
However, there’s a bigger departure from
convention in the wings. Microsoft has realized
that when you want to contact someone, you
don’t care what number you have to call-you
just want to reach the person. This desire can
be satisfied in two primary ways:
• OCS supports call forking, better known
as simultaneous ringing. When you call
someone’s desk, for example, OCS can also
ring their cell and home phones so that they
hear the incoming call no matter where
they are.
• Using Communicator, you can redirect
incoming calls to another number. Say you’re
just about to leave your office for a meeting
when a call comes in. With a single click, you
can redirect it to your cell phone. The caller
is never aware that the call’s been redirected,
but when your cell rings you can answer it, walk out of your office, and get on with your
business. (You can also send calls directly to
voicemail, a terrific feature in my book.)
These two features mean that, for the caller,
knowing which number to call becomes much
less important. In addition, some of the new
OCS phone hardware doesn’t include any way
to manually dial numbers! For example, the
Catalina-class devices are just handsets, as
are the “Orca”-class wireless, cordless devices.
(Find more information about Polycom Orcaclass
devices at www.polycom.com/usa/en/support/voice/cx/communicator_cx400.html.) Because Communicator can dial any of
the phone numbers associated with contacts
in your contact list, you can start a call to someone
without having to dial a phone number;
when you do place the call, the features I’ve
described make it easy for the person you’re
calling to route the call appropriately. You can
still enter a phone number manually using
Communicator, using either an on-screen dial
pad or by just typing the phone number itself.
Of course, for these features to be useful, you
have to actually populate your directory with
the correct phone numbers. Exchange can use
your personal contacts folder to look up phone
numbers, but you’ll probably want to consider
updating AD to ensure that your employees
have correct home and office numbers. In doing
so, this might lead you to consider giving them
the ability to edit their own phone numbers
(and possibly other directory information) by
using a product such as Ithicos Solutions’ Directory
Update (www.ithicos.com).
Quality of Experience
Quality of Service (QoS) is a networking feature
that’s supposed to allow isochronous traffic
(traffic that’s synchronized with or based on
a timeline-for example, voice or video) to
flow without interruption or degradation. QoS
depends on network equipment and software
that can tag network packets with information
about the kind of data they carry. With appropriate
QoS policies and equipment, you should
be able to ensure that voice or video traffic
takes priority over file transfers, SMTP, or other
protocols that aren’t isochronous. However,
QoS has some problems that have slowed its
adoption. The most obvious is that to get any
benefit from QoS, you have to implement it
everywhere within your network; if you don’t,
non-QoS-equipped devices might affect the
quality of voice traffic as they happily ignore
QoS restrictions. Compounding this problem
is the fact that you can’t guarantee that QoS
will be preserved across the Internet, making
it difficult to guarantee adequate voice quality
for users outside the firewall.
Microsoft’s approach to preserving voice
quality doesn’t use QoS at all (although you
can still implement it on your network if you
want). Instead, Microsoft’s products focus on
delivering high quality of experience (QoE),
a measure that indicates how satisfied users
are with the overall communications experience.
This is a good move on Microsoft’s part
for two reasons. First, the codecs used by
OCS 2007 and Communicator 2007 are smart
enough to adjust their encoding parameters
according to the amount and latency of bandwidth
available. Speech and video quality
gradually degrade as the amount of bandwidth
decreases, but you can get surprisingly good
voice and video quality with as little as 64kbps
of bandwidth. Second, Microsoft’s products are
closely integrated, so that features like click-tocall
and presence indicators are ubiquitous
and easy to use. For most users, “easy to use”
translates directly to “better QoE scores,” and
because Microsoft controls all the pieces of its
solution, it’s able to capitalize on its products’
integration to improve QoE.
The sound quality of IP telephony sessions
is most commonly measured using the
Mean Opinion Score (MOS), a single-number
score that’s supposed to express the perceived
quality of the received audio. An MOS of 1
is low; an MOS of 5 is the highest. Listeners
are asked to rate audio in terms of its quality
(how understandable or intelligible it is) and
its impairment (ranging from unobtrusive to
very annoying). All other things being equal, if one UC system has a higher MOS score than
another, it’s reasonable to expect that users
will be more satisfied with its voice quality. In
a 2006 study by Psytechnics (www.psytechnics.com), Microsoft reported that the MOS scores
for Communicator’s RTAudio and RTVideo
codecs beat the MOS scores of several competing
codecs. However, the actual experience
your users get will vary according to the quality
of their connections and the sound hardware
they use. Even with good voice quality, shouting
into a laptop microphone doesn’t give as
good an experience as using a good-quality
headset or external device, and you should
factor the cost of such equipment into your
deployment budgets.
UC Partnerships
The launch of OCS 2007 was preceded by
an unusually large number of partnership
announcements. One of the reasons Exchange
has become such a successful product is
because there are hundreds of third-party
companies developing software and solutions
to extend and improve it. However, email
essentially provides built-in interoperability;
you don’t have to worry about PBX interoperability,
which kind of IP phones to buy, or other
issues that have held back the deployment of
UM and UC solutions. A number of vendors
have introduced or announced products specifically
tailored to work with the UC features
of OCS and Exchange; these range from software
such as Geomant Enterprise Solutions’
message-waiting software for Exchange to
hardware such as Samsung’s line of monitors
with built-in cameras and microphones and
Polycom’s IP phones that work directly with
Communicator. Because there are several different
clients that work with Exchange and OCS,
the potential market for ISVs that sell products
to enhance Exchange and OCS is expanding,
and ISVs are taking notice. This same approach
has worked wonders for Exchange.
Try Before You Buy
Over the last several years, Microsoft has thoroughly
embraced the concept of “try before
you buy.” You can download trial versions
of Exchange, OCS, and Communicator, and
prebuilt sets of virtual machines are available
for these products as well. This gives you an
easy path to test out how the products might
work in your environment and how your users
might accept them. Microsoft’s own consulting
and sales organizations often offer proof-ofconcept
deployments as part of their initial
sales approach because once users get a taste
of the feature set, they immediately start finding
ways to put those features to productive use.
For example, you can deploy a single Exchange
2007 server to act as a Mailbox and Client Access
server, then let selected users test the new
Exchange ActiveSync features, or you could add
a single OCS 2007 Standard Edition server to
provide presence and IM to a pool of test users.
Pilot and proof-of-concept projects for UC products
make good sense because these products
often represent long-term strategic investments
and should be treated as such.
OCS and Exchange: Keys to
Microsoft’s UC
OCS 2007 and Exchange 2007 are core parts
of Microsoft’s product line. Exchange has
grown to be more than a billion-dollar-a-year
business, and the Unified Communications
Group would no doubt like to see OCS join
that exclusive club, too. Whether it will do so
depends on how well Microsoft can execute
its vision for software-powered VoIP as an
adjunct to other forms of communication,
and on whether companies are willing to
deploy OCS in conjunction with Exchange to
take full advantage of the integration points
between the two products (and with other
Microsoft products.)
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wilson2k5 January 01, 2008 (Article Rating: