Two very different VoIP platforms. One company (Microsoft). Will the two ever meet?

Under the headline Microsoft unveils VoIP-enabled phone platform, WindowsForDevices.com has a story about the hardware coming to market that's uses Microsoft's Windows XP Embedded-based  "Response Point." According to the post:

Microsoft last week unveiled a VoIP-enabled phone system software platform based on Windows XP Embedded. "Response Point," currently in beta, supports both IP- and traditional analog-based telephony, targets small businesses, and is expected ship this year in production devices from three vendors. 

The post has images of some of the devices that are expected from Quanta, D-Link, and Uniden. More importantly (at least I thought at first), it appeared to answer the one question that I forgot to come back to when I interviewed Microsoft's Unified Communications Group product manager Paul Duffy on video regarding the company's unveiling of the beta version of Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator (the client side). In that interview, Duffy says at around the 9:50 timemark:

As well as the people who are signing into the office communications server, maybe they've got a phone on their desk and this phone is running something called the Office Communicator Phone Experience and they can now use that PC to make and receive phone calls.

During the interview, I meant to come back to that comment about the phone running the Office Communicator Phone experience but forgot to. Then, when I saw the news about Response Point and Microsoft's VoIP-enabled platform, I thought, "Aha! That's it!" But before I jumped to any conclusions, I decided to do a little Web searching just to be sure. Sure enough, there are posts like this one from Geekzone that appear to make the two -- Response Point and the Office Communicator Phone Experience -- seem related. Under the headline Microsoft unveils Response Point small business phone system, the post says:

In addition to “Response Point,” Microsoft delivers an extensible, software-based VoIP foundation through Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007. Microsoft will distribute the public beta versions of Communications Server 2007 and Communicator 2007 later this month. The Beta 2 release of "Response Point" is scheduled for early April.

But, as it turns out, other than the fact that both have to do with VoIP and both come from Microsoft, the two are actually unrelated. Microsoft has two separate approaches -- one for big businesses, the other for small -- when it comes to the VoIP hardware people may one day find on their desktops. One of these is the Office Communicator Phone Experience that Duffy was referring to.

According to a Microsoft web page:

Microsoft Office Communicator phone experience, Communicator-based software designed to run an innovative set of new voice and video devices — including business-enabled IP desktop phones — from Polycom Inc., LG-Nortel Co. Ltd. and Thomson Telecom. This is a new ecosystem designed to run on dedicated communications devices in tandem with Office Communications Server 2007 to extend and enhance the Microsoft unified communications experience.

The list of phone gear manufacturers is clearly in a different class (an enterprise and medium business class) than the ones making devices that are based on the Response Point platform which is geared more towards small businesses. The subtle differences may be articulated in a post from Tom Keating who wrote:

What Microsoft has done is leverage the SIP VoIP standard to allow you to use any SIP endpoint you want (Cisco phone, Polycom phone, etc.) but if you want the power and functionality of OCS 2007, such as presence, then you have to use their softphone client (Office Communicator). A fair compromise IMO. Microsoft is also partnering with hardware phone manufacturers to embed the OCS code in the IP phone so you get the same functionality of the Office Communicator client.

That would in fact be very cool to have a lot of the functionality that you might normally see showing up in Microsoft's Office Communicator Client -- for example, "presence" information about your co-workers along with the ability to instant message them -- showing up on your desktop telephone instead.

Via e-mail, I asked Microsoft for more specifics regarding the user experience on an Office Communicator Phone Experience-enabled phone. According to a spokesperson, "Communicator for devices" is designed to deliver a "person-centric and familiar unified communications experience:"

The design includes a scroll wheel that enables people to scan the availability status of contacts on their buddy list using Communicator for device’s enhanced presence indicators and initiate a call simply by touching that individual’s name on the large, color screen.  

Here, according to Microsoft, is what the LCD on a prototype of such a phone might look like (continued below).

(continued from above) In fact, this concept of integrating functionality (eg: presence) that's normally associated with unified communications isn't completely new. The Skype ecosystem is probably the most mature when it comes to the inheritance of unified communications client functionality (I'm speaking of the Skype client and its support for VoIP, presence, IM, etc.) by dedicated VoIP hardware (eg: one of the many Skype phones). According to company spokesperson Chaim Haas, pretty much any Skype phone with an LCD display also picks up on the presence information associated with your Skype contacts. But that's pretty much where the functionality ends. A quick Web search on the issue revealed at least one post that alludes to where unified communications hardware (Skype-enabled or otherwise) should go. In his Memo to Skype Phone Product Managers, Skype Journal's Jim Courtney wrote:

The Skype WiFi phones not only do not support chat but they also present a problem with attempts to chat with a Contact who is logged into a Skype WiFi phone. If a Skype user sees a Contact as, say, Online (from a Skype WiFi phone), they can attempt to send a chat message only to get a response to the effect that the Contact did not want to talk with them....Again the Sony Mylo presents the current best IM/Voice experience for Skype on a mobile device; however, the Mylo is not targeted as a wireless phone but rather a personal communicator where voice complements music, photo and video applications.

So, perhaps that's some food for thought on not just where the Office Communicator for Phones experience should (or will) be heading. In the mean time, if you're a Skype phone manufacturer, there might be a thing or two to learn from the Office Communicator for Phones hardware specification as well. Industrial design features like scroll wheels and color touch screens (ones that hopefully show avatars) are nice touches (no pun intended). 

In its e-mail, Microsoft was clear however that Response Point, which has its own Microsoft-controlled hardware specification, is not for intermingling with the Office Communications platform. According to Microsoft:

Response Point is designed for small businesses with up to 50 employees providing a full range of phone calling features including integration with Outlook, voice commands, built-in voicemail, voicemail-to-email forwarding and a speech enabled auto attendant. Response Point is delivered as an appliance associated with IP phones......The Response Point phone system software works with hardware designed by our three OEM partners, D-Link, Uniden and Quanta Computer. The system includes a base unit (small appliance about the size of an Xbox) and the desktop phones.  The phones and base unit simply plug into a LAN network.  The base unit connects to the phone extensions over the LAN. 

Translated: Response point has a base unit that takes the place of a traditional PBX and it does all the things like voice mail, directory and extension lookup, or IVR-based information retrieval (eg: directions to a location) that a PBX might normally do. On one side, a Response Point base station  (which should be able to work with any Response Point-based phone) connects to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and on the other (internally to a business), it connects to the Response Point-compliant VoIP phones via a company's wired Ethernet. I haven't seen any mention of Wi-Fi yet and understandably so. In an effort to make Response Point as turnkey as possible for small businesses, Microsoft and its other Response Point business partners probably can't possibly guarantee a reasonable quality of service over a wireless network whose Quality of Service (QoS) is subject to all sorts of external threats.

Response Point also offers some other newfangled features -- for example, it includes what Microsoft chairman Bill Gates says is the company's most sophisticated voice recognition technology yet for telling the system what to do. Via Response Point's voice activation, you can bark a co-worker's name into the phone and it will call that person. Or, you can ask for voice mail. Mid-call, you can tell a Response Point system to transfer the call that you're currently on to another person in the office (who is also connected to the Response Point system).

Finally, Response Point offers a degree of integration with Outlook whereby, through client-side software, not only can voice mail be routed to e-mail, but making outbound or taking inbound calls is a more integrated experience (eg: when your phone rings, the connection between the Caller ID information and your Outlook address book form a connection and you're notified who is calling). 

While I'm not normally one to say your best source of information on some topic or product is vendor provided propaganda, Microsoft has two videos that will give you a better sense of Response Point. The first is a downloadable video (requires a WMV-capable player) of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates "interviewing" Comenity's Mark McCracken on why a Response Point system makes sense for his small business. It's advertorial, but Uniden's Response Point phones make a cameo appearance that's worth seeing. Also worth seeing in the video is some B-roll of McCracken in his own office where he has neither a Response Point-based phone nor a Windows-based PC (it looks like a Mac) on his desktop. Note to Microsoft's video editors: You need to pay closer attention to those details so as not to leave the company chairman with his foot in his mouth.

The second video is an on-demand Webcast (unfortunately, it's not viewable without Internet Explorer) of a presentation given by Microsoft Research general manager Xuedong Huang and it does a much better job of demoing the platform in action -- everything from the management console (which looks dirt simple to use for the owner of a small business) to a Uniden phone to the voice recognition technology themselves.

Somewhere in the bigger picture for Microsoft is the challenge of managing the strategy for both. In her e-mail to me, the company spokesperson wrote:

Office Communications Server (OCS) scales from a single server to support smaller businesses to a scaled out multi-tier architecture to meet the requirements of the largest enterprises.  

On the one hand, it seems like Microsoft has indeed delivered what it says its delivering. Two very  different solutions that target very different markets. On the other, the company in its messaging is being very careful so as not to exclude smaller businesses from the more unified communications benefits of OCS that you don't really get with Response Point (although, there is some unification when you consider the Outlook integration).

Bottom line: The Response Point and Office Communicator ecosystems are built on two very different platforms.

Ultimately, though, I can't help but wonder if Microsoft would have been wiser to find some potential connection and migration points between the two platforms. At their very heart, both platforms have four strong commonalities: VoIP, PBX (Response Point replaces the PBX, OCS integrates with the PBX over a Microsoft-authored API), a central server that serves as the heartbeat of the VoIP connectivity (in Response Point's case, this is a turnkey appliance), and software-enabled phones manufactured by third parties -- ones that conform to Microsoft's hardware specifications. For example, whereas the phones for Response Point will all include a magic button that engages the system's voice activated command mode, the phones based on Microsoft's Office Communicator Phone Experience will have the scroll wheel and touch display. There's also a fifth but half-commonality in that both platforms aim to integrate with Outlook (OCS's integration is far more robust than Response Point's usage of Outlook contacts and its ability to pick up voice mail).