Outlook.com Claim your address now


Microsoft have released Outlook.com as a true cloud replacement for the Live.com and Hotmail.com systems we have used for years converging on the now familiar interface of Windows Server 2012, Windows 8 and Windows Phone. While having a Hotmail.com address on your resume was slightly embarrassing an Outlook.com address is a lot more credulous.


You could rename your existing Live / Hotmail account to a new Outlook.com account, or simply start again with a new Outlook.com address, but there is another way. Continue using your existing Hotmail account, but with the Outlook.com interface and create a new Outlook.com alias with the Outlook.com domain name.

An alias works just like a real email address but it’s not a separate account. If you have Xbox Live achievements, Zune purchases, Windows Live ID or you have a Windows Phone and don’t want to  hard-reset it, then they will all still work because you retain the Live / Hotmail account but also have a new Outlook address which you can use for your email.

There are however a few things to consider, you can only create up to five aliases each year. You won’t be able to use an alias on Windows Phone or any other mobile client or email application; it will only work from the Outlook.com web interface and you can’t sign in to Outlook.com with an alias you must continue using the original Hotmail account.

To set up an Outlook.com alias:

Log into Outlook.com with your Hotmail credentials. This will enable the Outlook.com user experience on your Hotmail account and going forward it won't matter where you sign in hotmail, live or outlook you'll get the new look.

1. Once in, click the engine wheel located on the top right of the page.
2. In this menu, select "More mail settings".
3. Now, look for the option "Create an Outlook Alias" under the "Managing your account title"
4. Enter your chosen alias and click create.
5. You have an option of receiving mail in a separate folder or in your hotmail inbox, personal choice here.

My advice is get in quick before your chosen address is taken by others. Microsoft are working towards decommissioning Hotmail / Live accounts and Live Messenger ceases to exist this coming March. Outlook.com and Skype are the next generation communication tools and non corporate versions of Exchange and Lync.
With Outlook.com, you get the new Metro-style interface and the brawn of what is one of the most powerful email services around.

Microsoft Kill Conferencing

Conferencing is dead. But that doesn't mean web, audio and video conferencing are thing of the past. They are merging into integrated components for a larger collaboration platform that includes conferencing tools as well as chat, shared white board, etc. Conferencing implies a single-purpose tool that is used independently and procured separately; a conferencing “system”.

This type of environment, a unification of many communication modalities, provides Visual Conversations (see zkresearch.com) a natural mode of communication more aligned to “real” meetings of old.

Audio Conference

It is Microsoft that is farthest along this road to true communication unification. At their Lync conference 2013 a work / life balance was a central theme of the keynote with phrases like "re-humanization of communication," "bring the living room to the boardroom," and "you're not just a worker" were used often. This consumer-driven theme felt very Skype oriented, but is new to the Lync discussion. Reference points for the future of Microsoft's Lync and Skype evolution all related to a focus on users, minimizing barriers, multiple platforms, and support for mission critical operations. Innovations like WebRTC are clearly key to full unification; currently Lync Web app for browsers lets any user join a meeting from a PC or Mac browser, but requires a plugin for the browser. Once this standard is ratified (and Microsoft is going against the grain with this one) any user on any browser can enjoy the benefits of full Lync / Skype communication modalities with no barriers.

The Lync – Skype integration is central to Microsoft’s UC plans, Skype brings to the Lync ecosystem over 300 million users, targeting a scale of billions of users and transactions. When compared to the number of Lync Enterprise Voice users, 5 million, these numbers are indeed staggering. In addition the importance of the Microsoft Office installed user base isn’t lost on Microsoft with nearly 1 billion Office users out there scope to grow an installed user base for UC modalities is vast.

Microsoft's core value proposition to the Enterprise is not a sea of Skype users it’s an end-to-end communications ecosystem that includes an identity engine and central directory (AD), email (Exchange), content creation (Office), content management (SharePoint), real-time communications including presence, IM, audio, video, data sharing, and conferencing (Lync) all tightly integrated and available across the user's preferred devices. Making it easier and more intuitive to interact across these broad layers of the communications ecosystem is the name of the game. Replicating a familiar experience between Office applications, with which a billion users are familiar, in the Lync environment is a very logical place for Microsoft to focus.

Missing from this picture are the social networking aspects of B2C or B2X communications, a corporate Facebook for collaboration. This is in Microsoft’s plans and comes in the shape of Yammer, a fully established enterprise social network. Expect integration to come with the next major release of Lync – 2014.

Additionally, the advent of the Lync Room System (LRS), and the tight integration it offers between Microsoft Outlook, OneNote, and Lync. The Lync Room System has the potential to eliminate historic barriers that have limited group video as a method of communications, making it easier to schedule, join, and moderate, making content sharing a more natural part of room-based collaboration. The Office and OneNote integration, on the other hand, can make group collaboration more effective making it easier to include traditional best practices such as meeting agendas, notes, and action items.

In summary, Microsoft has a set of technologies and products becoming ever more tightly integrated forming a single identifiable ecosystem, harnessing an existing user base and a new global network with familiar, intuitive, ever pervasive interfaces. How will the balance of power shift in unified communications with over a billion users relying on Lync/Skype for telephony, messaging, conferencing, presence and feeds?

Supporting Microsoft Lync Architecture

With huge financial savings to be made by fully exploiting the Microsoft enterprise license agreement, organizations needing to make efficiency savings are looking to Lync. Here in the UK and rather surprisingly, this is most prevalent within the public sector. Year on year cuts across the whole sector have forced a thorough re-evaluation of all assets. IT services is an easy target; equipment, licenses, support etc. all add up to a significant investment of Cap-ex and ongoing Op-ex. Move from VMWare to Hyper-V, Oracle to SQL and the PBX to Lync and you have saved a fortune on licenses, ongoing maintenance contracts and specialists within your teams to support the tech. 

No one is implying that Microsoft products are better in some way than the omni-present industry mainstays, rather the opposite, but they are cheaper and the senior management thinking is “migrate all of our services to Microsoft systems and our IT teams can concatenate down to just a few Microsoft guys”, implying that Microsoft SharePoint and System Center occupy the same skill set.

Whichever way you look at it Lync is replacing analogue phone systems and VoIP telephony alike, and bringing with it the deep office application integration that no one else offers, not to mention mobility.
As an organization looking to leverage the benefits of Lync for increased business efficiency and cost savings it’s easy to get it all wrong and difficult to get it right, here’s a few pointers:
Understand the components. Lync is not only gateways, phones, 3^rd party applications, load balancers and the front end / backend roles, but also the IP network, DNS, firewalls, reverse proxies and Active Directory.

Develop and share your UC strategic plan. If your Cisco experts think CUCM is the future, and Microsoft experts think Lync is the future then without buying into some common management direction, the end solution may be watered down, less efficient and provide less up-time.

Do you intend to support in-house or outsource as a managed service. Outsource if you’re moving fast and lack the required skills. If self-supporting, read on.

Align your teams. Retain experts in each key technology and bring them together to provide a shared service for the end users. Realign your teams, or at the least, break down the silos amongst Subject Matter Experts. They should commit to providing 99.999% service.

Choose systems integration partners carefully. Picking an SI with a broad portfolio and deep experience ensures your next decisions and investments will be future-proofed. Using a general Systems Integrator who handles Windows, VMWare, and Exchange may be a mistake. Lync is a complex product you need specialists.

Select components wisely. No less than five gateway manufacturers have at one point entered the market. Three remain. Even prior to Nortel being acquired by Avaya, the LG-Nortel IP phones were being discontinued. Ensure the SI partner offers a broad range of hardware and advice on who is exiting the market and who is investing.

Develop custom SOPs. The first-tier help desk should not always call the Lync expert if there’s an issue impacting Lync, because the issue may well be the Hypervisor, the LAN, or the trunk. Offer training enabling them to qualify issues and triage them to the correct tier-2 expert.

Get comprehensive, custom training. Effective Lync training for systems administrators is hard to come by. You can find installation/administration training on the market, but it’s aimed at certification and so once the system is installed half of the training is redundant. Consider using an expert to help your team understand how to diagnose and resolve issues relevant to your system and not an exam scenario.  

Retain an SME. Ensure you hold the contact details for a Lync subject matter expert, possibly the one that designed the solution. Bring them in at consultancy rates when you hit a problem that can’t be resolved in-house.

It’s easy to sell UC solutions to end users, specifically Lync UC. Unlike much of the IT technology we invest in within business, routers, firewalls, SANs etc. its high impact; the users get to see it, interact with it, it’s a shiny new toy. But it’s providing a critical service and moreover it’s replacing a device which we have come to rely on for even the most trivial operations; the PBX, the telephone. When it works it’s a look into the future of business, when it fails it will be your worst nightmare.

Current Top 7 Operating Systems by Internet usage.

Based on current trends we will see the standings shown below from June 2013.
Windows 8 has leapfrogged Windows Vista and Apples OSX to sit behind Windows XP.

As XP now enjoys only extended support and each new computer system ships with Windows 8 we can expect XP to drop to the number 3 spot in the future.
 
The debate as to whether Windows 8 will ever see widespread use within industry will continue until it does and inevitably eventually occupies the number one spot ahead of Windows 7.

1. Windows 7
2. Windows XP
3. Windows 8
4. Mac OSX
5. Windows Vista
6. iOS
7. Linux

The Lync Room System (LRS)

Lync is at the center of one of the biggest transformations in the way we work since the advent of the PC. The workforce is more distributed, with more flexible working hours and getting things done increasingly relies on collaboration with people in multiple locations. Bill Gates was referring to this trend when he said at the launch of Lync 2010, “Lync is the most important thing to happen to the office worker since the PC came along”.

Lync Room System from Smart Technologies

In Lync 2013 Microsoft have made significant investments in video and collaboration to make it really easy for individuals to collaborate from anywhere and on any device. The new video gallery enables all meeting participants to see and be seen and the mobile clients enable users to communicate and participate in a meeting from any device.

Lync 2013 is the fourth release of the Microsoft unified communications product line starting with Office Communicator 2007. The level of innovation we have seen since the start of our unified communications journey has been dramatic, if not unprecedented.

One area which hasn’t kept pace with this level of innovation is the meeting room, which is an area where information workers (IW’s) spend a lot of time during the course of a day. As more and more meetings involve remote attendees, the capabilities and expectations of these remote attendees make very clear how far behind the meeting room experience has fallen compared to desktop and mobile.

The best effort of the industry to bring communications to the meeting room to date has been with videoconferencing systems (VTCs). Over time, we’ve heard from many of our customers who are dissatisfied with their current videoconferencing experience that they wish it would just work and be as easy to use as their desktop.

So what exactly are the problems with conference rooms that make them so hard to use? Many of us who go to meetings on a regular basis know them well:

Time spent getting the meeting started: We’ve observed that it takes 8 to 10 minutes on average from the time someone tries to start a meeting to the time 2-way video is established and content is available in the meeting. Challenges abound in everything from getting the projector working to getting the laptop to project to getting video started.

Videoconferencing equipment is not well utilized: Most large companies have deployed VTCs in some meeting rooms but their usage is often limited to those who had the need to install and took the trouble to learn how to operate them in the first place. If you ask everyone else what they know about VTCs, they will probably comment on the camera at the front of the room pointing at the wall and the remote control on the table. This is primarily because the user interface for VTCs is not intuitive and even once it has been learnt, you still need to know the identity of the room you want to call to be able to establish a connection. VTC vendors have tried to improve this experience in recent years but it’s still not as intuitive as using the PC on your desk.

Remote attendees feel isolated: For most meetings with content and remote attendees, the in-room participants need to choose which of the two to show in the meeting room as there is only so much screen real estate available. Most often, the in-room attendees choose to show the content which is the subject of the meeting, and not the video of the remote participants. Without the 2-way video connection, out of sight is like being out of mind and remote attendees aren’t able to contribute effectively to the meeting.

Meetings are hard to manage: When you finally get the meeting started, you still need to worry about managing the participants, the audio/video and the content being shown in the meeting.

What is a Lync Room System?

Lync Room System is a meeting room solution consisting of integrated hardware and software delivered by our partners and optimized to join Lync meetings. With Lync Room System you can join an online meeting with one touch and be ready to collaborate with remote attendees in seconds. It has all the equipment you need for great meetings:

LRS - VTC

1.High definition touch displays (1080p) for showing video and enabling collaboration. Lync Room Systems are available with 1 or 2 front of room touch displays depending on your room size

2.High definition video camera for capturing the room in full 1080p resolution

3.Wideband audio for clear sound from the room and to the room

4.Table-top touch meeting console to enable the meeting controller to manage the meeting without distracting the other attendees

It’s all brought together by the Lync Room System Edition software, which is a full Lync client optimized to bring the immersive meeting experience to a meeting room setting. It makes joining meetings as easy as on your PC and breaks down the barrier between in-room and remote attendees. Being able to see content and high definition video side by side makes remote collaboration more effective.

When will Microsoft add call center to Lync?

Microsoft Lync is often compared to specific contact center type software and of course it comes up short. Lync is not meant to satisfy this need, there is a functional ACD which works very well, but from a feature/functionality and cost positioning point of view it's of course not meant for structured contact centers. It's functionally a departmental ACD. Lync can be considered as Personal branch exchange, not Private branch exchange. It takes the knowledge worker or information worker as a baseline. This implies that the individual becomes ones own office assistant, ones own receptionist, etc. Lync doesn't need any call center, because no knowledge worker or information worker needs any.



The platform called UCMA on which OCS and Lync are built is very rich and enables  advanced capabilities such as programmatic escalation to conference, silent monitoring, barge in and recording, etc.
There are lots of contact centers being built on that platform. Not all are public like Aspect, some, like ExtendHealth, are internal to companies for their own purpose, and are used to run their entire business. Aspect is partially owned by Microsoft and they now have two solutions designed for Microsoft Lync.

So Lync is not a contact center product, but the Lync platform is not only credible but increasingly "the" platform for building contact centers on.

Innovation in the call center space for Lync will be driven by the 3rd party ISVs; by providing SDKs and APIs to interact with the Lync framework Microsoft is allowing industry needs to drive innovation and development to that part of the product and that is something that simply cannot be done on top of other UC platforms.
Call Center on Lync will be fine and we will see tremendous movement in this space as Lync gains market share, and that is something of a certainty.

Microsoft partners with a number of Independent Software VendorsISV's (including Aspect) for various 3rd-party solutions - contact center included:http://lync.microsoft.com/en-us/Partners/Pages/application-partners.aspx



 

Are Homogeneous Environments Better?

Not so many decades ago if you wanted software for your IBM computing environment you commissioned a software house to write it for you, you owned it and altered it to suit changes in the marketplace. Nowadays we buy off-the-shelf products and make them fit our needs. There's a whole marketplace of software vendors and when we need to achieve a particular business function we have many products to choose from.

So how should we make our choice? Do we go with the cheapest, the one with the best support contract, or the one that offers us the most functions?
As with any business procurement we should choose the one that, after everything is taken into consideration, offers the biggest return on our investment over a measured period. This could be through additional generated business or reducing operating costs.

Typically it means that we tend to grow our IT environments around multiple vendors which, at the time of purchase, may have offered the best product for us. In slightly less able organisations it's steered by whichever salesman does the best job as the internal team just don't have the skill-set to make the right choices.

There is a case to say that taking each business function in isolation it is correct to choose from the whole of the market an application which best meets its needs, but this will lead to a heterogeneous environment with multiple vendors. Applications which must be tied together which have not been designed to do so, much greater complexity in supporting the environment, less uniformity, a greater chance of a failure and when something does go wrong a "pass the blame" attitude from the vendors.

Taking all of our electronic business functions into consideration, not just the usual authentication, file storage and e-mail but also telephony. It hasn't been possible until recently to build a truly homogeneous environment based around one set of centralised management tools, for many organisations a holy grail. Over the past three years, Microsoft have gone strongly into innovation mode on many product lines. For the first time it seems they have a master plan of cohesiveness with development teams using a high degree of communication to ensure uniformity over the entire product range. For the first time these products are truly designed to work with each other using common management interfaces right across the data centre for our n-tier applications whether on-premise or private cloud. The turnaround started with Exchange 2010 and its leveraging of local storage as opposed to complete reliance on expensive shared storage and extends from there to System Center 2012, the new version of SQL Server following in Exchange 2010's footsteps and technology, Windows Server, Windows 8, the new App-V, Office 365 and not forgetting Lync Sever.
Many of the products in Microsoft new line require us to invest in yet others. Take Lync Server. We may have decided to move from an old PBX system for Enterprise Voice, so we invest in a Lync server infrastructure, we then need Microsoft SQL servers and although we were going to migrate away from it we now have a reason to retain Exchange and upgrade to the latest version. While we are doing that we should probably virtualise using Hyper-V and for management of the whole infrastructure, the one stop shop of System Center suite.

There are many benefits to this approach:

• A common management interface. All of these products share a common installation routine and web / MMC based tools. Of course we're supposed to be using PowerShell commands for them all and that's a standard across everything.
• Guaranteed interoperability. With all platforms and applications designed to work with each other there's less time spent on workarounds.
• Documentation on everything in one place. Microsoft Technet, if we need to know something we just go there.
• More timely training of support staff. Skills can migrate quicker across applications for the administrators and engineers as many products have shared concepts and terminology.
• One point of contact for troubleshooting; it's all Microsoft software, we have no one else to be directed to.
• Less complex environment leading to less downtime.
• A centralised management and deployment point. Using System Center we can deploy, manage, secure and update our entire infrastructure.

The above benefits feed into a lower total cost of ownership due to requiring fewer support personnel; each staff member can cover a bigger skill base and support multiple products. No more having "the Exchange guy" we now have "the UC guy" and he looks after all of our messaging and telephony. We also don't need to maintain system integrators or hire consultants by the hour to integrate disparate technologies and less downtime ensures less business hours lost through loss of service.

Despite obvious benefits of a homogeneous many organisations don't subscribe to this system and prefer to remain vendor neutral, whatever the case Microsoft will continue to roll out their master plan as we move forward through 2013. I suspect they have many more surprises for us over the next few years.