OK- this has been building up in my mind for a while now and I think it’s time to just start saying it: OCS shouldn’t be considered as a "PBX Replacement" now – or ever. <gasp!> Do I not believe that OCS is a reliable voice platform? No way – quite to the contrary. My gripe is that if you are thinking of it as a PBX replacement only – you are missing the boat.
It’s too low of a bar and frankly misses out on the visionary aspects of OCS. OCS is a communication and collaboration platform and the aim really, truly is to change the way an organization does business. Now one component of collaboration and communication is voice. But it’s not the only component. It’s a part of how people do business and should be part of any collaboration suite. But sayin that is a whole lot different than saying OCS is Microsoft’s IP-PBX. It’s a hugely important distinction. Here’s why:
People who are looking to buy "phone systems" have already decided to accept the standard version of how people are going to communicate: pick up a piece of plastic, wait for a dial tone, punch in a series of numbers, and possibly speak to another person. It’s an extremely limited way of being able to collaborate with other people. We’ve gotten used to doing things that way, so it doesn’t seem strange. But if you think about it – people have been doing exactly those same things for ~100 years. The guts underneath may have changed – the voice now may be packet-switched (Cisco) or traveling over fiber-optic cables vs. copper wires. But how is the user experience any different? It’s not. To create an IP PBX is to constrain yourself to old, outdated, and artificial boundaries for communicating. And that’s why OCS should never be thought of, marketed, or sold as just an IP PBX.
Frankly, no one should market OCS as a PBX replacement. The list of "PBX features" not available with OCS is long and distinguished. Music on Hold, shared line appearances, hunt groups, call pick up groups to name a few. Yes- these features will be added over time… no doubt. But wait! Think about it… Should you really be needing all features anyway? Or are those features are all designed to overcome a traditional PBX’s shortcomings!! Why do you have "music on hold"? Because you need something to keep you occupied while the phone system waits for someone to become available. But what if you already knew when someone was or wasn’t available (presence)? You wouldn’t even call in if you knew the right person wasn’t available – and thus not need hold music to keep you from hanging up! Same with hunt groups – they are rigid, digital way of semi-intelligently routing calls to people who need help. Why not create a SharePoint workflow or Speech Server app that routes callers to the best, most available resource based on aggregated presence info and route the request via Instant Message? Wouldn’t that achieve the goal (connecting the right person to the right resource in order to resolve the issue as quickly as possible) much more quickly? Or do people really like "Press 1 for this, 2 for that, Please enter your 43-digit number now, your average hold time is 119 minutes".
I get that some people like the way things are and are resistant to change. They want their phone to work and look like the same phones they’ve used for their whole lives. And maybe those users will never "get" the newer/better ways to do things. So, yes, OCS should evolve to include those users.
But to me, here’s the right way to look at this "lack": don’t design a new solution around old problems; look at the problems themselves. Most communications problems all boil down to this: how can we connect people to people and people to information? And this is what OCS does better than any single platform out there. This is how OCS should be marketed. Yes, it requires you to free your mind (in a Bob Dylan way) from the old communications constructs, but if you want to be involved in truly transformational technology – changing the way people do their jobs – you don’t hand them a color, touchscreen IP phone, and say "this works like your old phone". No!! You spend the time to find out how people communicate in an organization, you locate the bottlenecks and the friction points, and you design a new solution around that. This is Microsoft’s strongest selling point of OCS: it’s not bound by the same constraints of older technology platforms.
This isn’t an easy sell. You aren’t coming in with a widget that "does what the other guys do, but cheaper". This product aims way, way higher than that. The key is selling people on the idea of transforming collaboration and communication processes inside in their own organizations. Show them how Presence+IM+Calendaring+application sharing+video along with voice is a better way to run a business vs. a collection of plastic handsets with numbers and symbols tied together with wires. This stuff works. This saves money. This saves time. This streamlines the back office and operations.
So the summary here is that OCS should be thought of as an entire way of doing business, not as a PBX that also has IM bolted on to it. OCS is designed to be the former, but I can’t help but feel that people sometimes falls into the trap set by other vendors and they end up marketing it as the latter. But that’s not the battle here. It’s not a battle with hardware vendors to see who can put what handsets on desks. The battle is with organization’s own broken communications processes. When you put your time and energy into that battle, you’ll win every time.
It takes a different mindset though; it requires us to get in front of customers and help them realize a vision rather than executing a PO. And it requires us to prove the vision – that it will save time, money and make people better at their jobs.
I truly believe that MS is the most well positioned to reshape the way we all collaborate and communicate. OCS is at the center of this vision because of that, not because it’s the "best PBX out there".
