Firstly – many thanks to all the Singularity Partners and Microsoft folks I met at the MS Partner Conference in Houston, TX. Every year there are a couple of key topics which come up in the keynotes, and I really liked the way the later sessions then went into more detail. The whole Software as a Service (SaaS) discussion is one topic we’ll cover in more detail in a later blog entry. I want to focus on another highlighted area today – namely Unified Messaging (UM). Microsoft has been putting increased emphasis on this over the past few years, and it was prominently featured at this year’s conference.

Unified Messaging has been kicking around for a while – originally taking the form of features such as ‘follow me’ numbers and voicemail alerts. There have always been usability problems with interfaces (typically programmed via the phone keypad) and many of these systems were expensive.

Now that the world is used to instant messaging, IP telephony and virtual conferencing, there is almost a second dawn for Unified Messaging. The usability is much easier, we all understand concepts such as ‘presence’ and with multiple devices we do see the real advantage in a unified approach to communication. The opportunity for Microsoft is to get involved in the enterprise communications market – the opportunity for partners is to be able to easily access Telco-type functionality and significantly enhance their application.

Singularity has been promoting ‘real time Business Processes’ and ‘Presence Enabled BPM’ for some time. By leveraging presence and BPM, we can bring additional velocity to many processes. Examples include:

- If a document needs to be urgently approved, the system can check to see which approvers are present and available before sending.
- Open a chat window when they pick up the task to rapidly resolve any issues.
- Use click to dial to place calls to colleagues.

By embedding Unified Messaging within the Business Process the user is often utilising underlying UM capabilities without even being aware of it.

About the author: Manus Savage is the Partner Manager at Singularity, a leading BPM vendor (www.singularity.co.uk).

Tags: BPM, Microsoft, SaaS, Unified-Messaging

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 8:40 am and is filed under BPM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.