Smart move by Microsoft
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This article Microsoft Looks to Seed Presence Capabilities in Its Own, Partners' Applications discusses the newly announced (not yet available) RTC presence toolkit from Microsoft. I don't care how anyone spins this announcement, this is a smart move by Microsoft. Microsoft has a proven track record of getting their stuff hooked into 3rd party apps. Even if it isn't true, but I think it is, people often comment on how 3rd party vendors always seem to integrate with Outlook first, and then later with Notes, the argument has always been that's it's due to market share, but I don't buy that, I think it's down to Microsoft making it easier. If you're a vendor and you're developing some kind of application to hook into the mail system, I can pretty much guarantee you you'll find sample code on MSDN on how to do it with Outlook/Exchange, or it will be some ActiveX component you just drop into your app to do it.
With the announcement of this presence toolkit, Microsoft is making the right moves to expose LCS server to 3rd party developers. Now I hear you say, but this is all possible with Sametime as you guys have done it with Outlook, that's very true but it isn't easy. The biggest limitation facing 3rd party developers who want to build presence awareness etc. into applications is the limitation of the Sametime Connect client being a closed environment. The Microsoft Clients, all have some form of automation available, so you have the ability to kick of chat windows, audio video meetings etc. all with the sexy UI of whatever the latest installed version has. For Sametime developers you have to build all this UI yourself (unless you use the Java UI), this obviously has some benefits in that it means that 3rd parties like us could take the initiative and add features like time stamps, emoticons, click able Notes urls etc. but it leads to an inconsistent experience for end users. I Imagine the IBM developers who worked on Notes 6.5.1 IM integration could have saved themselves a lot of time if they were able to reuse the existing Sametime client UI?
Anyway, this is good news from Microsoft if for no other reason it keeps the heat on IBM to keep a focus on Enterprise Instant Messaging.
These observations obviously shouldn't surprise anyone as they aren't anything I haven't talked about before, and in my suggestions on how to improve Sametime sales I had mentioned some of what I believe to be solutions before. Obviously if the world lives in solutions purely built around the Workplace Rich Client, or IBM portals there's no problem, but come on this is the real world isn't it?
This article Microsoft Looks to Seed Presence Capabilities in Its Own, Partners' Applications discusses the newly announced (not yet available) RTC presence toolkit from Microsoft. I don't care how anyone spins this announcement, this is a smart move by Microsoft. Microsoft has a proven track record of getting their stuff hooked into 3rd party apps. Even if it isn't true, but I think it is, people often comment on how 3rd party vendors always seem to integrate with Outlook first, and then later with Notes, the argument has always been that's it's due to market share, but I don't buy that, I think it's down to Microsoft making it easier. If you're a vendor and you're developing some kind of application to hook into the mail system, I can pretty much guarantee you you'll find sample code on MSDN on how to do it with Outlook/Exchange, or it will be some ActiveX component you just drop into your app to do it.
With the announcement of this presence toolkit, Microsoft is making the right moves to expose LCS server to 3rd party developers. Now I hear you say, but this is all possible with Sametime as you guys have done it with Outlook, that's very true but it isn't easy. The biggest limitation facing 3rd party developers who want to build presence awareness etc. into applications is the limitation of the Sametime Connect client being a closed environment. The Microsoft Clients, all have some form of automation available, so you have the ability to kick of chat windows, audio video meetings etc. all with the sexy UI of whatever the latest installed version has. For Sametime developers you have to build all this UI yourself (unless you use the Java UI), this obviously has some benefits in that it means that 3rd parties like us could take the initiative and add features like time stamps, emoticons, click able Notes urls etc. but it leads to an inconsistent experience for end users. I Imagine the IBM developers who worked on Notes 6.5.1 IM integration could have saved themselves a lot of time if they were able to reuse the existing Sametime client UI?
Anyway, this is good news from Microsoft if for no other reason it keeps the heat on IBM to keep a focus on Enterprise Instant Messaging.
These observations obviously shouldn't surprise anyone as they aren't anything I haven't talked about before, and in my suggestions on how to improve Sametime sales I had mentioned some of what I believe to be solutions before. Obviously if the world lives in solutions purely built around the Workplace Rich Client, or IBM portals there's no problem, but come on this is the real world isn't it?
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