Communication Heaven (Microsoft Office Communicator 2007)

Member Name: 87degrees

Product:	Microsoft Office Communicator 2007
Date:	29/03/09 (349 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: presence, phone conferencing, video chat, easy to use, IM, cost savings

Disadvantages: none

Picture the scenario. You're working with a team of people who are fairly spread out. Maybe they're in different rooms in the building. Maybe they're in different buildings. Maybe they're in different towns or even countries. You have an idea you'd like to run by someone.

So you call someone up. They're unavailable so you get their answerphone. You try the next person on the team. This person was in an important meeting but had forgotten to put their phone on silent and you've just inadvertently interrupted a presentation with your colleague's annoying ringtone. You try someone else. This person is available and you have a productive discussion about whatever it was you needed to talk to them about but only after you wasted time on two false leads. And when your colleague checks his phone and finds the missed call, he'll phone you up to ask what the call was about, wasting even more time.

That would be prevented if you had Communicator.

With communicator, you see the names of the people you work with (grouped however is appropriate for you - I have recent contacts, then my immediate team, the others on the graduate scheme, then other colleagues) and next to their name is a little dot. If the dot's red, it means they're busy. If it's pink, they're not online. If it's yellow, they're away from their computer. If it's green, they're free to talk. If it's a do not enter sign - they don't want to be disturbed and some attempts at communicating with them will be automatically blocked. If you hover over a little red dot you get a bit more information - whether they're scheduled to be in a meeting, giving their status as busy or in phone call. I know at a glance which of my colleagues are free to talk. I can just look at communicator and see which of my team would be able to take a call so I don't waste time calling those who are unavailable or chasing up answerphone messages when someone called me.

To call them, I click their name and get a menu. One of the options is a voice call over the computer. Communicator is part of a voice over IP (VOIP) solution. This basically means phone calls over the internet - which is a lot cheaper than phone calls over a traditional phone line. I get a clear voice conversation as if I was using a phone and the bills are a lot lower. I've not had any problems with sound quality so I can speak as clearly to someone over the internet as I could if I were using a phone.

I can call people all around the world. The company I work for has offices in different countries. I can call up someone in any of those offices and have a phone conversation without anyone having to pay international call rates. In fact, without anyone having to pay anything because it's all done over the internet.

It's not just confined to calling people who are in the same company also using Communicator. I can phone ordinary phone numbers through Communicator with the same voice clarity.

And phone is just a tiny part of what Communicator is useful for. If I click on someone's name, I can start an instant messenger (IM) conversation with them. This is like MSN messenger. It's a chat window in which I can enter text and smiley icons and they can reply. Because it's an internal system rather than something like MSN messenger, it's a lot more secure. This means the company isn't going to worry about me discussing important company business over IM which it might do if I was using an external IM tool.

I know some people worry about employees using IM at work. They worry people will use it to chat when they should be working. To be honest, they probably do, but there are occasions when IM is incredibly useful. In a lot of ways, it's a like a phone conversation because you can have a two-way discussion. But it's also like email in that you can save conversations and refer back to them later. How many times have you had a phone conversation with someone and then, a few days later, needed to remember exactly what was said? When I have an IM conversation with someone, it automatically gets saved to a conversation history folder so I can go back and check. If a colleague says they're going to do something, I have it in writing and I can remember exactly what I said I would do.

I can start video conferences too. If I have (and the other person has) a webcam hooked up to my computer, it's a simple matter to click on their name and choose to start a video chat. This opens up a video displaying their camera view and shows me what my camera shows. You get asked first. So If I'm working from home and still in my pyjamas, then I can turn down a request for a video chat.

Communicator is clever in how it handles bandwidth. If you're having a video conference over a poor internet connection, Communicator will lower the quality of the video so that you can still see what's going on. If the connection gets worse, the video may stop altogether but you'll still get perfectly clear voice. This is because, in the vast majority of cases, the voice connection is what's most important.

Then there are conference calls. I know that the company I work for has, in the past, spent a small (actually, not that small) fortune on conference calls. They used a conference call service that charged 12p per minute per person. So a call between three people for an hour would cost over £20. That might not sound like much, but these calls happen extremely often. And you would get situations where one person would leave the call and you'd be left with two people talking through the conferencing service - at a cost of 24p per minute for what is essentially a phone call. Given that just about every business is talking about cutting costs these days, saving money on conference calls seems an obvious step.

I can start a voice call with someone on my team. Partway through the discussion, we could decide we need to ask someone else's opinion. It's a simple matter for one of us to click the "invite" button in the call window, type in the person's name (or choose it from a contacts list or enter a phone number) and they will get a call and be able to join in. Maybe we'll want to run something by our manager, so I'll invite him in as well. Any of the new invites can invite people if appropriate. If everyone involved is using Communicator, the call will cost nothing. If one of the invitees is using their phone, the cost of the conference call will be the cost of an ordinary phone call at local rates to that number.

The same works with multi-person video calls. With video calls, Communicator detects who's speaking (with some clever software working out what's background noise and what's speech) and shows the speaker in a main video image with the others in smaller views embedded in the same windows. This way, everyone gets to focus on whoever's speaking.

Another great feature is simultaneous calling. I've set up Communicator to automatically ring my mobile whenever someone calls me. When someone calls my work landline number, the call comes up on my computer and I can answer it there, using my computer's speakers and microphone (or, more usually, a headset) but my mobile phone also rings. So If I'm not at my computer, I get the phone calls I would otherwise have missed. It doesn't matter whether I'm at my desk, somewhere else in the office, out visiting a partner or working from home - a single number will reach me.

If I lost my mobile phone, I can set up the simultaneous calling to call a different number. I can get Communicator to put all my calls straight through to voice mail if I'm busy. If I go away on holiday, I can set it up to forward all incoming calls to a colleague to handle. It just takes a couple of clicks.
All answerphone messages (which aren't that common thanks to simultaneous calling) get sent to my email inbox. I get an email with an audio file that I can play back. Have you ever had an answerphone message where someone rambles on for ages and then gives their phone number so quickly you're not sure you got it correct? You want to listen to the number again so you can be sure it's right but this means you have to listen to the whole message again. Not anymore. You can skip right to the relevant part of the message. They're stored somewhere easier to access - I hated having to go through those automated menus to get to my voicemail before now.

I don't have to remember phone numbers anymore. Everyone on Communicator is listed by their name. I can type in a name into a little search window (I can also start typing a phone number but I've rarely needed this) and it will bring up names of people as I type. So I don't even need to know the accurate spelling of someone's surname to start seeing results and probably find them. So I'm calling people not numbers.

You can type in notes. A lot of people I know automatically link Communicator to their out of office message when they go out to partners or on holiday. There's a little note icon next to their name and by hovering over it I see the message. Some people use this to say which office they're currently working from or to say something like, "I'm currently very busy working on... please don't call unless it's urgent." It's a really useful feature that adds to the coloured dot to give more information on what's happening with my colleagues.

With the coloured dot, I don't have to update this (though I can if I want). Communicator links to my Outlook calendar and automatically changes my status to busy when I have a meeting scheduled. If I lock my computer screen, my status changes to away without me doing anything. If I don't use my computer for a few minutes, the icon changes so it shows half yellow (away) and half whatever colour it was originally. So if I wander away from my computer for five minutes, people will see that I'm not necessarily there, even if my schedule says I'm free.

Communicator is incredibly easy to use. No one's ever given me any training in this program. I just use it. The features are clear and obvious.

Setting it up was also amazingly easy. I clicked to install, clicked next a couple of times in the wizard. I entered my username and password and it took my details from the company's directory. The only time I would need to enter any more information would be if I wanted to add a personal phone number for Communicator to call (it took the details for my work mobile automatically from the company directory).

I have never had a single problem with this program. It's never crashed or frozen or given bad voice quality. It's not so much as hiccuped.

You've probably got the impression by now that I love this program. I do. It makes my work much easier - I can work just as well from my desk as I can from home. If it saves my employer money so that they don't have to cut jobs, I'm not going to complain about that either!

But it's only as useful as it is used. If I were the only person in my company to be using Communicator, it wouldn't be nearly as wonderful. I would still be able to use it for the call forwarding and simultaneous calling. I would be able to answer calls on my computer or start conference calls but no one else would be able to start conference calls or invite people to join. The presence (which is one of the most useful features to me), instant messenger and video calls wouldn't work.

To get the most value out of Communicator, just about everyone in a company would need to be using it. Because it's so easy to use and useful, it shouldn't be too hard to convince them to try.

It's not for every company in the world. If you work for a business with only one or two computers, there's no point. If your office is a single room so you can check whether someone's available just by looking, the presence features aren't exactly much use. Where Communicator starts being useful is when you have a large building with lots of employees using computers to do their jobs. When people are based in different rooms, the ability to have instant conversations and see whoever is free is really helpful. When Communicator becomes unbelievably valuable is when you have multiple offices or people working from home or other sites.

For large companies with offices in different countries, Communicator is so useful it's almost a no-brainer.

Summary: A wonderful program for improving communication

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