Ed Brill

MS TechEd: Live Communications Server 2003

I captured some of this on Wednesday, and just now am getting around to posting it.  I left the conference yesterday...there's only so much I can take ;)
Anyway, there was a session on Wednesday afternoon about MS Live Communications Server.  I found this session interesting for two reasons:

• The presenter seemed to take the attitude that business instant messaging is a brand-new idea, something future-oriented.  "The scary thing is that you don't know where it's going to go".  Well, I think IBM Lotus has a pretty good idea, having been in market for six years and lead the market the entire time.
• The presenter spent several minutes, and several slides, explaining how "strategic" LCS is to Microsoft.  Many of these slides were exactly the same as those I remember from the last Exchange conference (MEC) in October, 2002.  "Only Microsoft can deliver these solutions today and build on them tomorrow."  Uh huh.  In my experience, when a Microsoft presentation has to spend as much time and energy as this one did explaining that the product is "strategic", it's usually another stone in the MS collaboration graveyard within 6-12 months.  Especially since so much of the useful future feature commitments were listed as "Longhorn" era.

Oh, and here's a great sales pitch for LCS's scalability: "It's a lot of servers, but you can do it."