"Today, many companies are facing the same challenges: how to improve communications and increase productivity, while reducing operational costs, and they are increasingly looking at unified communications software to help meet and solve these challenges. Last month, we highlighted telecom customers that are implementing Office Communications Server 2007. This month, we are taking a look at how manufacturing businesses are benefiting from implementing Microsoft’s unified communications software." Read more ...

Due Date: Mid August!

What a great week. Last week we launched Office Communications Server 2007 R2 through an entirely virtual launch that my team drove (www.OCSR2LAUNCH.com). The launch featured a keynote from Stephen Elop including discussions with customers and partners and focused on the business value of unified communications in these economic times. The launch was an incredible success with tens of thousands of viewers watching the keynote and spending time on the site. Much kudos goes to Avi Sagiv for coordinating all the activities that went behind this effort!

 
One of the fun parts about the virtual launch was creating media that viewers would watch online. Unlike a physical event where you tend to have a captive audience (less of course the mobile phone addicts), online you have to work hard to keep people’s attention. But you also need to deliver deeper content for those that want it. We tried to factor this in by creating the keynote as a “TV Show”, complete with commercial breaks. Some people saw this as too much of an infomercial and a little cheesy (Joe Wilcox of MicrosoftWatch for example), but our initial stats show that a lot of people did actually watch the entire show. Having strong messages, mixed in with humor in the breaks, made for much easier viewing. Also, many of the breaks consisted of graphical illustrations of the virtual launch site and how to navigate to key content, creating a “visual imprint” in people’s minds of what they should do next. This seems to have worked in getting viewers to spend time on the site exploring case studies, partners, and product content.

For the actual video content, we tried not to have all the content be 1 hour talking head sessions as a lot of technical content posted on the web tends to be. Instead we broke down the content into three buckets, Case Studies, Product Discovery and Breakouts. The case studies were 2-4 minute videos highlighting the customer story in a succinct way. The breakout sessions were deeper talking head sessions with a PowerPoint deck that focused on key technical content (e.g. how to deploy voice). And the product discovery sections were more fun, short videos showing the end user experience ad excitement. I ended up doing an “infomercial” to excite folks to learn more about software based communications solutions for example. All in all, we are getting great feedback on the site … even Arstechnica said “The Microsoft Unified Communications Group announced a new product yesterday, and it did it in style.”

The press pick up has also been pretty good. What was great was the customer and partner validation of our story. It sometimes get’s old hearing about the vision and value proposition for a product, but customers share their stories and give tangible examples of business impact, that makes a difference. It’s what we all work for and the whole team is thrilled. The press articles really picked up on some of these quotes …. here are some of my favorites.

Victor Nunez – Infonavit: Microsoft OCS R2 Launch Day: His verdict on OCS voice was: "It's working great."

Gregory Bryant – Intel: Microsoft: Your PBX Is 'Dead': "We're really addicted to meetings," noting that OCS R2 helps reduce the costs of doing "about a million minutes on audio conferencing every day."

Mike Browne – Sprint: Microsoft Rounds Out Voice Assault: Mike Browne, vice president of client services, says the company will eventually replace nearly 500 PBXs around the globe. He also ticks off savings including $240,000 annually with OCS rolled out to some 3,000 employees so far, and $5 million by eliminating handset replacement and going to soft phones and headsets.

Terry Gold - Gold Systems: Network World: "Companies can look at this and say Microsoft is serious here. Microsoft is throwing down the gauntlet. This is a viable alternative."

Michael Dinan - TMCNet.com: Praise for Microsoft's VoIP-Driven UC Solution, OCS 2007 R2, from Dimension Data: Hailing a VoIP-driven unified communications solution from the world’s largest maker of software – a cost-effective telecom technology that appears to be thriving in this slower economy – officials at a South Africa-based systems integrator say they’re saving clients’ money.

So all in all, a very successful launch both from OCS team perspective, and as an experimental marketing channel for Microsoft. Expect to see more virtual events from Microsoft in the coming year. In the meantime, time to get heads down onto the blockbuster release for next year!