Carl Tyler's Blog

Communicate and Collaborate at the Speed of Business Responsive. Innovative. On-the-go. Global. The "speed of business? is accelerating, which creates a pressing need for organizations to shield users from complexity, while optimizing and extending the value of IT and telephony investments. An open, holistic strategy for unified communications and collaboration enables enterprises to leverage and enhance business applications, processes and their underlying systems, while delivering a user experience that sets people free to easily find, reach and collaborate. Mike Rhodin, General Manager, IBM Lotus Software will share the latest on IBM's unified communications and collaboration (UC²) strategy and preview new technologies from IBM development labs. Mike will illustrate how enterprises are building upon their existing technology investments and tapping solutions from a rich ecosystem of business partners to add value to their organizations.

Dynamic, robust presence capabilities are the key to providing much of the efficiency and transformation promised by Unified Communications. In this session, a panel of leading vendors will review current and pending presence capabilities, including applications, benefits and federation between enterprises. You will come away with an understanding of what you need to do to provide true presence capabilities to all your workers who need it, in whatever media they use.
KEY QUESTIONS:
* How has presence evolved beyond instant messaging "buddy lists?" What applications use/require presence capabilities today?
* What interfaces will users employ to take advantage of presence capabilities?
* What's required on the back end to support presence functionality? Is this a single infrastructure element or multiple--and if it's multiple elements, what integration efforts are required?
* What's the status of federation as a feature of IM and other presence-based applications? Can presence be extended across enterprise boundaries--and should it?

This tutorial is designed to help company CXOs/decision makers, IT and communications managers and technicians gain a good understanding of the architecture and functionality of both Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and IBM Lotus Sametime, two Unified Communications solutions expected to see widespread deployment. Attendees will gain key insights into the significant differences in how IBM and Microsoft approach the UC market, where their solutions are similar and where they diverge. The tutorial covers telephony call-control capabilities within Sametime and Office Communications Server, describing the unique mechanisms each uses for integrating with enterprise telephony systems. You will leave this tutorial with a thorough overview of Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Lotus Sametime, and a foundation to know whether to pursue either of these products as part of your enterprise unified communications solution.