Since then it’s been none stop meetings with schools, councillors, local government agencies and local businesses; and frankly we’re all really excited about the potential.  You see, what we showed everyone was not just our new offices, but a new way of working.

I’ve spoken at length about the lack of traditional telephony in our new offices, instead we invested heavily in understanding and building an OCS R2 infrastructure.  Unlike just about everyone else who has migrated to the new Microsoft Unified Communications platform, we went the whole nine yards and didn’t use or install a PABX.

Instead we took the purist route of linking our OCS servers to a traditional VoIP provider, namely Gradwell, a young entrepreneurial company with a very similar culture to our own.  Peter Gradwell, the companies founder, worked hard to ensure that we overcame the numerous technical obstacles to allow us to create a complete end to end Unified Communications solution that wasn’t limited by the features of an over priced PABX.

The result,we got the system completely functional and live just a couple of weeks before we moved into our new offices.  The transfer of existing numbers and an additional 50 DDI numbers proved trivial.  The office move was even easier; with all our numbers routing via Gradwell’s servers already all we needed to do was plug in at the new office, and voila, we were up and running!

The whole point of UC is the ability to be footloose, the office move demonstrated that perfectly.  But in the end it’s not the real benefit.  You see when we talk about Instant Messaging and video conferencing, these are mature technologies that businesses use to a greater or lesser extent every day.  In fact in many cases they tend to be the latest gimmick, put in by a techophillic C.E.O., used once and quickly forgotten.  The real USP of UC is the U – it’s Unified.

VoIP has suffered a similar fate to video conferencing.  It has gained some traction in larger organisations where the cost savings are just too hard to ignore, but it hasn’t yet made the dent in the market that it deserves to.  Why?  Well to be honest, it’s never really been as reliable as standard telephony, largely due to the somewhat poor internet infrastructure in the UK, which has been prone to down time at the least convenient time.  Businesses have long fretted over becoming too dependant on the thin  bandwidth pipe pumping bits into their office.

Luckily, things are moving forward, VoIP is gaining ground, albeit slowly, as the backbone solidifies and quality, and reliability improve.  But here’s the killer, why use it over traditional telephony and PABX’s, which already work?  Why use video conferencing when, let’s be honest, it’s a bit of a faff.  As is audio conferencing, if we’re honest.  Getting everyone to call in and use a pin, and wait until everyone’s there, and then pay extra for it – boring.

This is where OCS R2 comes into it’s own.  You see, it does IM, Voice Mail, Telephony, Conferencing (Audio + Video), Live Meetings, but it does it in one place and it’s so easy that anyone can use it once it’s set up.  In fact the whole thing can be federated, so if you have a supplier of client you work with frequently, who also use OCS, you can federate your two systems to make it even easier.  We’re federated to the major public IM systems (MSN, Yahoo, Google, AIM, etc.) and to Microsoft directly (which is great when we need to get support).

Let me give you to examples.  I telephoned my old man the other day from work.  Because we’re federated to Hotmail it found his Hotmail account from the phone number (which was public, I do try to tell him about such stuff!) and allowed me to add him as a contact whilst I was in the phone call.  Trivial, easy, but slightly cool.  In fact that’s our daily response, we just keep finding more and more wow factors.

Last week, I had the council and the local news paper in talking about the potential of hosting some up coming webinars from our office, using Live Meeting.  We demonstrated the technology, and they were so impressed that the venture is going ahead (more details to follow soon!).  But then I got to do something special.

Sat in the meeting room I IM’d Vivienne on reception, as her presence bubble showed she was available.  I asked her if it was OK for a quick demo, and she replied yes, so I clicked the telephone button and promoted the IM to a voice call.  Everyone said hello, as we were using the Roundtable device from Microsoft, so we were on speaker.

I then asked if we could video conference, Viv has a webcam, like most of our team now, so a quick press of the video call button and we were now video conferencing.  The Roundtable acted as the meeting room camera, picking up the current speaker automatically as we proceeded to chat through the call.  Wanting to go further, I dragged in Robin from the communicator window onto the video chat window.  Now the meeting room, Viv and Robin were all chatting  away.  At this point, we we’re getting a little meeting going, so I clicked the Live Meeting button, and we all started an ad hoc Live Meeting.  Now the Roundtable could start streaming it’s panoramic view as well as the current speaker.

For kicks, Robin started sharing his laptop screen, and gave me control so I could make some alterations to the Word document he was working on.  We finished the Live Meeting and our guests were left with their mouths on the floor.  You see, nothing is really new about what had just been done – it was the way it was done.  We’d started with an IM and ended up in a fully fledged Live Meeting, and the whole trip was just way too easy.

But we don’t just demo the stuff, it’s very much part of the culture now.  We’ve always been a training focussed company.  All our staff go through professional qualifications and we often work through them together as a company.  For example, we’re currently working through MCTS Exam 70-536, for .NET Framework Application Development.  Ensuring all our staff become qualified specialists in .NET.

Previously we’ve done the training for SQL Server, JQuery, and many of the other technologies we use on a day to day basis in the business.  We’ve always done the training by getting all the developers in a room around a white board, and working through a chapter or so of some book each week.  Now however, I sit in my office and run a Live Meeting.  The developers log in from their desks (some from home!) and I hit the record button.  I work through my PowerPoint slides, share my desktop when I want to demonstrate some code, and use the Q&A facilities and live polls within Live Meeting to interact with the developers.  Within an hour we post the training on our intranet site, for anyone who missed it, or wants to go back for some revision.

You’ll be glad to know I’m thinking about putting the training online for anyone else who’s interested, the best thing is being able to consider that as an option!

The real hard fact is that OCS R2 isn’t a gimmick, or the latest toy.  We’ve been using it now for four months, every day, and frankly we couldn’t live without it.  It integrates with our WinMo phones, and recently even my iPhone, and just makes everything so much easier.  When our customers dial in, we’ve even managed to configure it to find the best person to speak to automatically – something that would cost a fortune traditionally.  We’re now adding more CRM and Sharepoint integrations.

The only downside is that you’ve really got to see it in action to believe it, a blog post just doesn’t do it justice (especially when I write it!) Which is why I’m having to spend a lot more money on coffee, to cope with all the visitors.  We’ve already got a few asking how much it would cost for us to put it in their business, and the answer is easy – a lot less than you think!  Prices are dropping rapidly, but already we could do a fresh install less than it would cost for a comparable PABX system.

I’ve seen the future, because I’m already living in it.