Microsoft - Aspect in Contact Center

Last week, Microsoft has announced a multiyear global strategic alliance with Aspect Software to bring Unified Communications and Software Powered Voice to contact center sector. Understanding on the announcement; Aspect will integrate its.NET-based contact center suite (Aspect Unified IP) with Office Communication Server. This will certainly useful to both new and existing Aspect customers. In the announcement there is a missing component which addressing Microsoft’s Contact Center strategy via Unified Communication.

We still have not heard Microsoft will offer in terms of a contact center solution as a part of in conjunctions with its OCS offering. It’s clearly Microsoft recognizes how important it is to have some sort of contact center solution offering for customer that are looking into an Enterprise Unified Communication Voice solution but yet still has not disclosed any sort of contact center strategy to date.

Microsoft has several options clearly working with Nortel, a leader in the contact center space to provide the needs to contact center capabilities is one of the option. While Microsoft made it clear that the investment in aspect does not impact its relationship with Nortel. I’m pretty sure Nortel folks aren’t exited with this news. Another option is to acquiring a company in the contact center market, such as Aspect or possibly Interactive Intelligence. Of course there still some rumors that Microsoft will acquire Siemens Enterprise Communications, Nortel, or any others which if true, would provide Microsoft with the needed contact center capabilities and expertise. These are still rumors and so far no truth to any of them yet.

I believes that there’s a good change that Microsoft will leverage both Nortel and Aspect’s expertise and than offer its own contact center offering, (may be competing with both companies). Regardless what route Microsoft is moving to, it’s important that they articulate iuts contact center strategy for those companies that are looking to OCS as an enterprise voice solution.

Microsoft Office Communicator License Expired

I think some of you might encounter this pop-up error “Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 cannot start. The product license may be expired because you are using a pre-release or evaluation copy of the program, or the product key information may have been modified in your Windows registry. Please run Setup to uninstall and then reinstall Communicator.”

This error means the Microsoft Office Communicator has expire or caused by the package install method. You may require to reinstall with the Office communicator again. Get the CD from your MSFT Select CD pack or from you Microsoft Reseller or you may download from MSDN.

Some deployment applications use transforms with the MSI that have included the ProductID property. This ProductID value is set to "none" in the registry key below. This will then trigger the timer for evaluation. Once the timer expired the message will be received. There is no indication to the program that it is running in evaluation mode.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator\1.0\Registration\ProductID

There are 3 options to resolve this issue:

Option 1: Repair the MST (transform) by removing the ProductID property. Then delete the ProductID value in the registry and let the MSI self-heal.

Option 2: Re-push Communicator with the corrected transform & product key. This should run a repair and will replace the bad ProductID in the registry.

Option 3: Push an uninstall package; then the corrected installation package for Communicator

OCS 2007 with Dual Focking Feature

Can OCS 2007 have the "Dual Forking" capability? This is the question many people trying to search for. Nortel has been working closely with Microsoft to make this a reality with their CS1000 system which enable "Dual Forking" capability and without needs of media gateway.

If you want to find out more, please visit the following link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb735838.aspx

Microsoft Real-Time Communications (RTC)

Microsoft RTC is describes protocols such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Language Extensions (SIMPLE), and Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). Microsoft uses these protocols and related technologies to provide a real-time communications (RTC) platform for corporate multi-modal communication, which includes voice and video communication, instant messaging, application sharing, and collaboration. With this; voice communication and the way the Microsoft Windows XP operating system supports it are used to illustrate how the underlying technologies work.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control (signaling) protocol for creating, modifying, and terminating sessions with one or more participants. It can be used to create two-party, multiparty, or multicast sessions that include Internet telephone calls, multimedia distribution, and multimedia conferences. SIP is designed to be independent of the underlying transport layer; it can run on TCP, UDP, or SCTP. It is widely used as a signaling protocol for Voice over IP, along with H.323 and others.

SIP has the following characteristics:
a) Transport-independent, because SIP can be used with UDP, TCP, SCTP & so on.
b) Text-based, allowing for humans to read SIP messages.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a protocol optimized for the transmission of voice through the Internet or Wide Area Netowrk (WAN). VoIP is often used abstractly to refer to the actual transmission of voice (rather than the protocol implementing it). VoIP is also known as IP Telephony, Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone and Voice over Broadband. "VoIP" is pronounced voyp.

Companies providing VoIP service are commonly referred to as providers, and protocols which are used to carry voice signals over the IP network are commonly referred to as Voice over IP or VoIP protocols. They may be viewed as commercial realizations of the experimental Network Voice protocol (1973) invented for the ARPANET providers. Some cost savings are due to utilizing a single network to carry voice and data, especially where users have existing underutilized network capacity that can carry VoIP at no additional cost. VoIP to VoIP phone calls are sometimes free, while VoIP to public switched telephone networks, PSTN, may have a cost that is borne by the VoIP user.

Voice over IP protocols carry telephony signals as digital audio, typically reduced in data rate using speech data compression techniques, encapsulated in a data packet stream over IP.
There are two types of PSTN to VoIP services: Direct Inward Dialing (DID) and access numbers. DID will connect the caller directly to the VoIP user while access numbers require the caller to input the extension number of the VoIP user.

Call Hunting with OCS 2007?

In PBX space, Call Hunting is a calling festure for inbound calls to "roll past" a busy signal or retrying on a scequest of extentions or numbers until the call is connected.

Can Call Hunting feature work on OCS 2007? No... At the moment OCS 2007 will not able to support Call Hunting feature. If in the situation where its still require this feature, it has to be configure on the existing PBX system.

Internet Convergence Conference and Exhibition (ICCE) 2008

The Malaysian National Computer Confederation (MNCC) will be organising ICCE 2008 on the 11-13th March 2008 at Sheraton Subang.

The march of technological developments in the ICT industry has been relentless. IPT is the fastest growing sub-sector within the industry as evidenced by frequency and intensity of new ICT announcements and literature of matured products and solutions.

For further information on ICCE, you can check the following website:http://www.mncc.com.my/icce2008/index.html

http://www.mncc.com.my/