Unified Messaging

This is another post about computers and the Internet, so if they don’t make your heart beat a little faster, then best turn away now.

 

I was interested to see a case study recently published by Microsoft that concerned my old employer, Shell. When I worked there, our communications infrastructure was a horrendous patchwork of multiple technologies and vendors covering the channels of telephony, video, and computing (email and web). The dream was to try and bring some order to this chaos, but at the time it would have been very difficult for two reasons: immature technology and organisational politics, to put it politely.

 

Still, times change and things move on. I was pleased to see an old colleague of mine, Johan Krebbers (Shell’s Group IT Architect), put forward the vision to provide a single user interface for all Shell’s 150,000 users of real-time communications. It’s a big challenge to consolidate about 200 PBX systems, multiple audio and video conferencing systems into a single service. I wish him and his colleagues the best of luck. Mind you, if anyone can make this work, it will be Johan – the man’s a phenomenon.