Do you use a CRM? We are guessing yes. Most likely that’s where your pipeline is maintained.

Does the invaluable discussion around an opportunity or deal happen inside the CRM. I am guessing No.  That’s your chat / IM solution.

Here is a simple solution that can leverage both these applications to ensure 360 degree communication. It can greatly enhance visibility and follow up of the pipeline opportunities and potentially increase the turnaround.

You can write a simple application to monitor your CRM system and push any interesting opportunity to the respective chat room or owner based on your business rules. This will ensure that any interesting information being captured in the CRM is surfaced on your primary communication system, maximizing the opportunity for collaboration.

In the example below I have an FX opportunity that’s just been created in the system and is worth more than a million dollars. As soon as it is saved in the CRM system, I get an alert in my chat window.

 

The link in the alert here provides single click access to the relevant opportunity for anyone interested in it.

 

As a corollary scenario, you would also want the valuable information generated while collaborating on such opportunities to get captured in your CRM system along with the context. This again can be achieved using a very simple Bot that lets you send Notes and update properties of specific objects in your CRM system.

In the illustration below, for a lost opportunity alert, user sends an update as free text from within the chat client which will automatically be added in the CRM system as an activity for the owner of the opportunity.

 

Here is how the text message from chat will appear in the Opportunity. Notice the highlighted activity.

 

So, this is a very basic integration example. However, the concept can be used to achieve far more sophisticated results and to automate workflows that can substantially improve your productivity.

Deepak Kumar MOSS, Microsoft, Unified Communications

The Office Communicator client offers much more than just IM – it is a rich application that offers conferencing, voice, and desk sharing among other features. For business users in the Financial Services space, these features can be very useful. However, chat (IM and topic-based) is the most important medium of collaboration for these user communities. Given that Group Chat is available on a client that’s different from Communicator, organizations will have to roll out two separate clients to users to offer the whole gamut of communication features.

When talking to MindAlign customers, a question we hear quite often is whether users have a choice about how they use these clients. When a user has both clients installed, by default, IM is not available on the Group Chat client. So a valid concern is the impact to productivity as users switch between the two clients for IM and Group Chat. One option for organizations is to roll out only the Group Chat client. IM is then available on this client, and users can maintain their contact/buddy list at one place. The fact is that users are likely to be using IM and Group Chat a majority of the time, so this might be a safe choice.

But users would definitely like access to conferencing, voice and other communication features – these are what have the potential to increase business productivity and provide return on investment from the new platform. So does this mean that business users will be stuck switching between two chat clients on a day-to-day basis? Fortunately, no. Microsoft allows users to decide on the end point for IM with a simple registry setting.

Here are the steps to enable IM in Group Chat when you have both clients installed (when you only have Group Chat, you don’t have anything to worry about – you can use IM within Group Chat by default):

1. Add an entry, DisableIM under KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\GroupChatConsole\Permissions. This should be of type DWORD -  make sure the value is set to 0

2. Restart Group Chat – on logging in, you should see your buddy list and be able to initiate a private conversation.

3. If you are logged into Group Chat only, and someone sends you an IM, a new Group Chat window is launched. If you are logged into both clients, then both clients are notified. The client you pick first will handle the conversation. A different IM conversation can be initiated from either client.

4.  If you’d like to restrict IM to Group Chat alone, then you can disable IM on Communicator. You can use the registry entry DisableIM type DWORD = 1 under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator - You can continue to use Voice, Conferencing and other features on Communicator.

Sweta Jagirdar Unified Communications Microsoft Group Chat, Microsoft Office Communicator, OCS

Unified Messaging is an Exchange Server role that was introduced in Exchange Server 2007. It enables you to access your message types (e-mail, voicemail, fax, SMS text) from your Outlook email client. The basic idea behind Unified Messaging is that users communicate in a variety of different ways. Some users prefer to send E-mail messages, while others prefer using the telephone and some users might need to have live discussion. Now, if you bundle these choices into one single entity you get - Exchange server 2007. And if you add flavour of instant messaging you have - Microsoft OCS/GCC Â

Now you will ponder, what is the term Unified doing here? - Well, the term Unified refers for the basic message layer being common for different message type. This means, data gets captured in single formative body that can be represented in different formats as per the chioce of end user with subtle UI variations.

The term Unified Messaging(UM) is sometimes confused with Unified Communications(UC). UM systems culls messages from several sources (such as email, voice mail and faxes), but holds those messages for retrieval at a later time. And the way or underlining protocol that does this job of delivery forms your UC.

In a company though, a user typically has two separate mailboxes; one for E-mail messages, and another one for voice mail messages (google/yahoo etc ..). Furthermore, voice mail has traditionally been tied to the telephone. Although it is common for voice mail to be remotely accessible, users often find themselves writing down names, numbers, or messages on pieces of paper, which often get lost! (at-least it happened with me :))

Microsoft designed Exchange 2007 so that the Inbox allows users to store E-mail messages, voice mail messages, and faxes all in the same place. This frees the user from having to look for messages in multiple locations. It also gives users a way to make voice messages search-able; just in similar fashion we search our mails in Outlook. Now with OCS 2007 R2 you can check offline messages and post emails as chat to your internal chat environment.

So in brief Unified Messaging can provide you:
- Voice mails/Phone calls/Missed calls/call waiting/Forwards/Call forking
- IM chats/Group messages with Emotions :), etc..
- Create own filters/triggers
- Contact grouping
- Remote call controls and remote desktop sharing
- Web conferencing

Vishvesh Ram Raiter Unified Communications communications, OCS, Unified messaging