When communication about Unified Communications doesn't communicate anything.

A year ago tomorrow, I posted something entitled "Civilisation will come to an end because no one will understand what anybody else is saying"

It seems I manage to post that the Beta of Office Communicator is live, before the product team did. And more tersely too.

How's this for saying "Surely in the 21st century technology can help us call the person we want, instead of all that mucking about with phone numbers. ".

Interaction Impedance Mismatch: Users were frustrated because the experiences offered to them by the current communications systems didn’t match their mental model. A prime example of this is the initiation of communications. Users wished to communicate with other users. However, they found themselves communicating with other users’ devices. Because the systems didn’t offer the right abstractions so that users could have interactions that matched their mental model, there were instead exposed to the details having to make a choice whether to call a person’s office phone number, or their mobile phone number, or disturb them and call them at home

Eileen's managed to negotiate with the folks in Redmond to bring forward their plans to get us the devices so we can show you the new bits of this technology and not just the videos for it (which are on the download site as well).I'm so looking forward to that.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, office Communications Server, live Meeting, Live communications Server, communicator, betas