At VoiceCon, I’ve spent some time hanging around the Microsoft booth trying to squeeze those guys for information about R2. A lot of my conversation has centered around the devices available for OCS. I’ve blogged about this before, and so has Jeff. Overall the devices (headsets, handsets, speakerphones) provide a pretty good experience. But I’ve thought that there’s room for improvement. And for me, it starts with the Tanjay (pictured below)
I got some good info about the Tanjay’s future with R2. And here’s the good news: it’s more usable thanks to a USB-pairing capability with your laptop/PC. The Tanjay has always had a USB port on the back of the phone – I’ve never know what it was for. And now I learned that you connect it to your PC running MOC & the Tanjay and MOC become one. Very OCS Zen.
Here are the top 5 "better together" aspects:
- When you unlock your PC, it unlocks the Tanjay. Yes!! No more typing my username and password on the Tanjay’s touchscreen.
- The unwieldy "Software Update Service" required to update the Tanjay firmware is gone. The process has been incorporated into the OCS front end
- When you click-to-call from Outlook, it makes your Tanjay go off-hook and call the person you’re dialing.
- When you place a call from your Tanjay, it pops a window open on your PC so you can then add IM or Video.
- When you log into the Tanjay only, (not into MOC) your presence says "Available – Voice Only" so that people don’t try to send you IM (because the Tanjay won’t send/receive IM)
I still don’t really care for the looks of the Tanjay: too boxy for my liking. But the tighter integration to the MOC client has lent some major useability improvements.
Lastly, I pressed really hard to find out if some Tanjay-lite device was in the offing. Something smaller, less fancy than the Tanjay; maybe like the "workhorse" IP phone for everyday people. Nobody would tell me anything specific, but they did all say it was a common request and the product team takes that seriously. Hmmm… wonder what that means???
