The Joy of IM

Hey guys,

One of the things that I miss the most about not working at Microsoft anymore is the corporate IM provided by Live Communication Server 2005.

Live Communication Server 2005 is one of my favorite products actually.  It does the basic IM functionality - presence and message sending, but what makes it really stand out is the integration with your telephone system.

Live Communication Server 2005 can integrate with a number of PBX (private branch exchanges) to enable you to literally right-click on an IM client and call them up.

It sounds trivial, but that little feature saved hours and hours of time, and dozens of emails. 

Talking on the phone with someone can be a remarkably productive thing to do when you're trying to solve a problem. In my experience, thorny issues are rarely solved properly with a long email thread. Those long threads seem to eventually sputter out with no resolution, or someone abruptly ends things by saying something rude. For some things, a good old conversation between a couple of human beings directly can solve things so much faster and better.

This is where I think LCS really comes into its own; by integrating into the existing phone line, or many of the VOIP PBX's, you can really increase the productivity and morale of a team.

When used properly, IM can be so much richer than email - the integration between LCS and Office is really compelling. Whenever I opened a document in MS, I could see a list of everyone wh had a hand in that document, and whether they were online or not.  You could easily imagine the same sort of thing for source code files in Visual Studio. If the person who checked in a given file is online, you can quickly IM them with questions if you needed. If they were not online, you would know immediately and do something else, rather than waiting indefinitely for an email response.

There is an obvious question about why one wouldn't just use a public IM service like Yahoo, MSN or AIM for the same purpose. A lot of those services offer some level of phone integration as well.

I think it boils down to how comfortable one would feel about having business conversations over a public system like Yahoo, MSN or AIM. The implied confidentiality of those conversations would seem to make the investment in LCS worthwhile.

Anyways, if you have a chance, pop over to http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/communicationsserver/default.aspx and have a read about LCS. If you're feeling really adventerous, have a look into the multitude of PBX systems - my favorite is Asterisk, an open source PBX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk_PBX)

Thanks!

Eric.