Conflicting strategies aired at unified comms show

These three Microsoft employees are making use of the software giant's foray into videoconferencing by holding an impromptu meeting on its stand.

The conferencing unit is called Microsoft Roundtable, and it stitches together an image from each of its five cameras to provide participants with a 360° view of the conferencing room.

The Roundtable unit was developed internally by Microsoft and has retailed for $3,000 (£1,500) since its release six months ago. Tayside Fire and Rescue Service in Scotland is one of the first customers, and is taking advantage of the units for training purposes.

Away from the stand, Microsoft was keen to talk up the prospects for its UC offerings, Office Communications Server and the corresponding client software Office Communicator.

"Our goal is for one-quarter of our 400 million Office users worldwide to be able to click to dial in the next two years," said Mark Deakin, UC manager for Microsoft UK.

Microsoft is also making some tentative steps to other vendors. One such initiative, with contact-centre specialist Aspect Software, is aimed at broadening the reach of the contact centre.

Currently, in most organisations, if a contact-centre agent cannot answer a customer's query, the case is either dealt with badly or not at all. What Microsoft and Aspect are trying to do is to enable contact-centre agents who are faced with a difficult enquiry to dial out to specialists within the wider business.

The hope is that the venture between Microsoft and Aspect will enable the agent to answer the customer's query without having to hang up and call them back. To enable this to happen, all contact centre staff and specialists would need to use Office Communicator to indicate their availability. Agents could then choose the best available specialist to answer the query. Microsoft and Aspect hope this will lead to much better first time resolution for customers' queries.

Separately, Microsoft is now working with two videoconferencing vendors, Polycom and Tandberg, so businesses can set up video calls between the users on conferencing units and users at their desk.

Though it is encouraging to see Microsoft develop offerings with other vendors, Deakin confessed at the event that the codecs involved are still proprietary to Microsoft. He defended the codecs, saying they were superior to the standards-based alternatives. "Standards-based codecs don't deal well with bad network conditions. Quality of service doesn't check the quality of the conversation," he said. "[Our codecs] measure the quality of the experience. Is it echoey? Was there a hiss?"