Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Last month, one of my great dreams as a geek at Microsoft were fulfilled.  Today, a piece of technology that I’ve been yearning for for over 12 years finally became available to me.  Today, I got to experience something that has been on my hot list for a very long time.

Today… my Exchange Mailbox is "Unified Communications" enabled.

1. Hyperlinked Dialing
   Anytime a phone number is prefaced anywhere on my computer (within a Word document, in a Outlook email, in a Web page in Internet Explorer) with the prefix of "TEL:", I can with a single click dial the phone number.  My computer will automatically leverage Office Communicator and initiate a regular phone call through the speakers/microphone of my computer.  For example:

                 tel:3105551212

2. Roaming VOIP Phone
   Any person calling my office number not only rings the phone in my office but also rings my computer’s "soft phone" if I’m connected to the Internet.  This means that I can "pick up the call" on my computer and talk to the caller through the speakers/microphone on my computer, and if the call originates on Microsoft’s VOIP network, it’s received in full 64kbps high fidelity, i.e. CD quality audio.

   So I can be in Hawaii and if people call my office phone, I can pick up the call in the middle of a Starbucks using a Bluetooth headset… or just the speakers and microphone on my laptop if I’m in the privacy of my hotel room.

3. Converged Inbox & Voicemail
   Anytime a voicemail is left, it automatically appears in my Outlook 2007 inbox and appears as more than just an "attachment" which is the way most unified communication’s voicemail appear.

   Outlook examines the voicemail object and presents the voice mail as a SPECIAL object in Outlook which allows a person to not only listen to the voicemail but also rapidly type comments and notes into the same Outlook object.

   And y’know that ‘visual voicemail’ stuff that Apple has for the iPhone?  GOT IT.

4. Outlook Voice Access
   My Email, Calendar, & Contacts are all accessible over the phone from a central 800 phone number – the same phone number, I use to access my voicemail.

   When you call the phone, you can do all of the following using your voice or your keypad:

1. Read your email
2. Read back your calendar
3. Cancel meetings, request meeting rescheuling
4. Look up people’s contact info
5. …and more!