First Look at Microsoft's Phone System

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3951455092348818785.post-54285136741968118902007-10-26T10:12:00.000-05:002007-10-28T22:03:39.752-05:00First Look at Microsoft's Phone SystemA dramatic change is looming in the phone system market. Your next phone system will not be a system at all. It will be a piece of software installed on a server. You'll probably purchase it from the same company that sells you servers and network equipment. If you want a phone on your desk, you will have a small computer with phone-like features (a handset, a hold button, etc) provided by phone software. Many of you are already operating this way. I flew to Houston this week for my first look at Microsoft's Response Point phone system. Response Point is Microsoft's first complete phone system including dedicated hardware, handsets, and voicemail. Microsoft's goal is to introduce a system that looks and feels like a standard phone system but sets the stage for a huge transition. The transition to a software based phone system. The idea is nothing new, vendors such as Cisco and I3 have been selling systems like these for years. Response Point is unique in that it is designed and priced for small businesses with basic phone needs. It provides an amazing voice recognition system that removes the complexity of basic phone usage. Do you want to call a coworker? Just speak their name. Pick up a call on park? Just say the "magic" words. The quality is remarkable. You won't have to repeat yourself often. The phone system, for now, is pre-installed on a dedicated hardware platform. There are two manufacturers that will offer a product under the Response Point name - Quanta and D-Link. Quanta has a superior feature set including Power over Ethernet support on the phones (translation: lower total costs) and remote gateway support which will allow phones at your home or remote office (technology trap: If you try this, you will have voice quality issues). The system really shines in the areas of configuration, voice recognition, and compression. Setup is FAR easier than any other phone system I've seen. A low end IT technician or advanced non-technical user could setup a new user, move a phone, or change a voicemail password without any training. The voice recognition features are amazing. Microsoft has really mastered that technology. In addition the compression of voicemails is incredible - about 100KB per minute. My Avaya IP Office cranks out about 1MB per minute of voicemail. Have you tried opening your emailed voicemail with your Blackberry? Even a 1 minute voicemail isn't worth the trouble. As you should expect in a version 1.0 product the system has crippling weaknesses. Backups are a manual process and can only be automated through a Scheduled Task (translation: too much trouble). There is no Call History on the desktop application unlike almost all of its competition. Want to set a specialized holiday greeting to inform client's of your hours? Only possible manually. Forwarding a voicemail to another user? Not without email access. These are only a few of the features that Response Point lacks. The system has a long way to go. At $2500 with either 4 or 5 phones (varies for Quanta vs DLink) and about $160 for each additional phone, it is an attractively priced solution. However it will not compete well against low-end Samsung or Panasonic systems that provide many more features with less baggage. My recommendation is to wait until at least Version 2.0 before proceeding. Avoid the normal startup bugs and let Microsoft bring the feature set up to a competitive level. As a business owner you need to start familiarizing yourself with the concept of a phone system as software. If you can do that you will get a remarkable number of new features on your phone system and save a substantial amount of money.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3951455092348818785-5428513674196811890?l=www.exectechbriefs.com'/></div>Joe Gleinserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02655072306694807666noreply@blogger.com0