If a picture is worth a thousand words, a unified communication demo is worth at least as much.
Last week I had the opportunity to present at four unified communication seminars in four separate cities.
The presentations included analyst information outlining the value of unified communications, a number of case studies outlining the specific benefits actual customers received from UC and a live UC demo.
At the end of each seminar we asked participants to complete a detailed feedback form.
For over 80% of the attendees, the highlight of the two and a half hour seminar was the live unified communications demo.
In fact one participant who I spoke with afterwards said he had been to seminars presented by Cisco, Nortel and Microsoft and this was the first time he had seen a live UC demo.
The live demo involved plugging in my laptop to an internet connection at each of the four hotels and then beginning with a demonstration of the concept of presence using our day-to-day production UC environment.
Using presence I found a colleague who was available, sent them a quick IM to see if they had a few moments for a UC demo, escalated to a voice call, dragged and dropped another available participant into the conversation creating a multi-party call and then escalated to a video conference.
At the first session, given a three hour time difference between the seminar venue and most of my colleagues, it turned out to be lunch time back in my home time zone which meant finding an available demo participant took a few tries. The first available person was on a mobile device using Office Communicator mobile so could not help with the video conference.
In the end, while there were a few tense moments for me up on stage, it turns out that this trouble finding a demo participant really drove home the concept and power of presence to the audience. Afterwards, several commented that they knew this wasn't a "canned" rehearsed demo exactly because I did have a few unscripted moments.
I continued the live demo by showing how call control settings such as "simul ring" can be controlled using the OC desktop client. Emphasizing that a UC solution involving a desktop GUI client often can "unlock" existing features standard PBXs have had for years, simply by making these features easily available to the typical end user.
I then, because I like a challenge, gave a live demo of Outlook Voice Access (OVA) and its speech recognition using a speaker phone – actually a Polycom CX100 USB speaker phone plugged into my laptop. I had the speaker jack from the CX100 connected into the room's audio system so everyone could clearly hear the "Welcome. You are connected to Microsoft Exchange" and all the subsequent voice responses as I accessed my voice mail, email, calendar and contacts.
Presenting a live demo using speech recognition, especially with a speaker phone, sometimes requires nerves of steel, and a super-strength anti-perspirant! However, I found that the CX100 performed admirably. By the fourth presentation in four days, I found myself wandering far from the microphone, talking at normal volume and casually chatting with my OVA automated assistant. (Previously I had used a "Catalina" style USB device and found even though I held the handset closer to my mouth the results were far less favorable.)
I concluded the demo showing how "unified messaging" provides a single inbox for email, voice mail and faxes – even having someone leave me a voice mail message as I presented. I spent a moment showing how presence information and "click to communicate" is available directly within Outlook and spoke, briefly, about the future of communication enabled business processes. (I think CEBP is more than most people understand at this point, but this is a topic for another blog entry).
As the demo ended, I hoped the audience had an improved understanding of how UC operates and improves the business productivity in the real world and in my day-to-day world. The results from the session evaluations seem to indicate the demo was effective.
With regard to UC, I am a real pragmatist. I believe things work only when I can touch and feel them. I am dubious when only presented with spec sheets and glossy marketing brochures – especially when it comes to solutions that integrate offerings from different vendors! As such, I try to include a UC demo in every one of the seminars I participate in.
Have live UC demos been a part of the seminars you attended? Was this an important part for you?
And if you present UC seminars, do you include live UC demos? Why or why not?
As an aside, in 1927 the saying from this entries title made its introduction as "One picture is worth ten thousand words" in an advertisement of the time (erroneously attributed as a Chinese proverb to give it cachet). Notice that in our over visualized society a picture is now only worth a thousand words. Seeing all the images my children are bombarded with each day, I expect a picture will soon only be worth 500 words – and of course 500 words may be the total number of words the new "texting" generation is able to spell accuratelyJ. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words.
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