Nice pickup of some of the key messages around Sametime Unified Telephony from last week...
The larger issue that John Beck and his Lotus colleagues discussed was the idea, which underlies Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony, that Unified Communications means people contact (or try to contact) you, not a device that you're sitting next to or absent from. I think the scenarios about boundary-crossing are less illustrative of specific situations you're likely to encounter, and are more about demonstrating what it means to live in this world where you, not your device, are the communications endpoint. I mean, that's what you want, right: If you're mobile, you want to come and go as you please, and do whatever kind of work you need to do at the given moment.Link: Information Week Unified Communications Blog: Incremental Improvements >
The question isn't whether this is a good idea, or even whether it's a bad idea because you want to be able to escape scrutiny. The question is how much the enterprise should be willing to pay to make it happen. If we're not there yet, we're moving closer to a new environment, one where enterprise decision-makers have to look at their end users and say: I'm not going to give these people every conceivable device and means of connectivity - what does this person or class of worker need?
I disagree with the latter paragraph.
Isn't that exactly the problem we have had for the last 10 years or so in the mobile world?
IT doesn't want to support MY devices or anyone they don't want to support.
Maybe I like a Palm device or a Nokia or a Bold or Android, why SHOULD my IT group care?
The reason is because the vendors themselves, and telco's and UC companies can not and will not agree on a set of standards that all devices, networks and solutions run on.
While we may be getting closer to this finally, in the US we have at least 3 different networks, still. Europe was able to standardize on GSM for many years and it paid off very well for them and their businesses and the people that created businesses which interacted with it.
There the problem was truly a device OS related issue usually. And we still have this today, symbian, RIM, WMD, Palm, iPhone, Google none standardize although some do support multiple OS's.
With 8.5 and Xpages and the seamless way which it will run on RIM's phones, and hopefully others, going forward maybe the question should have been posted, not what device for who, but which network for who?
And in an extreme case, which messaging platform really is cross denominational? Hopefully a Lotus solution will be the answer.