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So I can't give any specifics about what has been shown at the event in Seattle because of the NDA, and I definitely can't discuss dates and things, but I can make some general statements. I suppose a couple of things that always do impress me when I come to these events. Even if you don't agree with Microsoft's approach to some areas, they do hire smart people. Chatting with some of the LCS folks, it's clear they get it (although some of the LCS sales folks I have met don't necessarily get it, yet). LCS has been slow to come about but they are doing a lot of clever things. The Office 12 and Outlook12 integration is looking good, whilst some features look like they could have been stolen directly from our Instant TeamMessenger product, we had the features because they made sense for the customer so aren't just eye candy features, and are useful features that have benefits for the end user. I believe Office integration is going to help LCS deployment more than anything else. Yes you can get integration with Office and Outlook from a 3rd party such as ourselves, but customers like the idea that it comes in the box or from the single vendor. I imagine IBM is going to come up against this as a sales blocker more and more in the future. If OpenOffice is the solution, then IBM better get their Sametime Integrated OpenOffice out quick, or IBM could acquire us to get Office integration for Sametime
The next version addresses most of the areas that LCS currently falls behind Sametime, so even though IBM is having a tougher time now competing against LCS, some of the key competitive advantages for Sametime will go away in the next version of LCS so it will only get harder.
I still believe that IM deployment will map very closely to a companies chosen email platform, but LCS is definitely maturing and we are starting to see increased interest in LCS applications. As more information becomes public about LCS Futures I will blog about what I can.
Sametime still has some capabilities in the toolkits that aren't available in LCS, but LCS also has some nice things that make integration easy for many corporate developers that are building VS apps, like the easily embedded presence controls. Sametime still has a much stronger story with cross platform capabilities with the Java toolkits.
It's going to be an interested couple of years coming up. Expect to see instant Messaging endpoints having as much attention paid to it as was paid to mailboxes in the past.
So I can't give any specifics about what has been shown at the event in Seattle because of the NDA, and I definitely can't discuss dates and things, but I can make some general statements. I suppose a couple of things that always do impress me when I come to these events. Even if you don't agree with Microsoft's approach to some areas, they do hire smart people. Chatting with some of the LCS folks, it's clear they get it (although some of the LCS sales folks I have met don't necessarily get it, yet). LCS has been slow to come about but they are doing a lot of clever things. The Office 12 and Outlook12 integration is looking good, whilst some features look like they could have been stolen directly from our Instant TeamMessenger product, we had the features because they made sense for the customer so aren't just eye candy features, and are useful features that have benefits for the end user. I believe Office integration is going to help LCS deployment more than anything else. Yes you can get integration with Office and Outlook from a 3rd party such as ourselves, but customers like the idea that it comes in the box or from the single vendor. I imagine IBM is going to come up against this as a sales blocker more and more in the future. If OpenOffice is the solution, then IBM better get their Sametime Integrated OpenOffice out quick, or IBM could acquire us to get Office integration for Sametime
The next version addresses most of the areas that LCS currently falls behind Sametime, so even though IBM is having a tougher time now competing against LCS, some of the key competitive advantages for Sametime will go away in the next version of LCS so it will only get harder.I still believe that IM deployment will map very closely to a companies chosen email platform, but LCS is definitely maturing and we are starting to see increased interest in LCS applications. As more information becomes public about LCS Futures I will blog about what I can.
Sametime still has some capabilities in the toolkits that aren't available in LCS, but LCS also has some nice things that make integration easy for many corporate developers that are building VS apps, like the easily embedded presence controls. Sametime still has a much stronger story with cross platform capabilities with the Java toolkits.
It's going to be an interested couple of years coming up. Expect to see instant Messaging endpoints having as much attention paid to it as was paid to mailboxes in the past.
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