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Welcome to my blog

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Hello and welcome to my blog! I hope that this site will be a place where you can find and exchange information with the growing community of Unified Communication users. First, let me introduce myself. My name is Chad Lacy and I'm a Support Engineer for Microsoft in Charlotte, NC. I am a member of the support team whose job is to support enterprise customers on the installation of Live Communications Server. I have recently been put on a special project of working with the Product Group on Office Communications Server 2007 during its beta and supporting the TAP customers that have joined the beta test of OCS 2007. So, I'm hoping this site will be a source of information and insight.

 Prior to joining Microsoft, I worked for a Fortune 500 company where I rolled out Exchange IM, Live Communications Server 2003, 2005, and 2005 with SP1. I've watched this product grow rapidly in such a short period of time. I'm very excited about the future of this product. Microsoft's advancement of Unified Communications is well ahead of the industry. I'm not just saying this because I'm a FTE at Microsoft. It literally is the reason why I joined Microsoft.

I evaluated many of the leading competitors and have kept a close eye on the industry. There are some very interesting offerings. Put so far, no one comes close to the offering from Microsoft. It is a solution for small and medium sized businesses and large enterprises. It is truly unified. LCS 2003 brought the world presence, LCS 2005 extended IM into federated partners, and OCS 2007 will bring us voice. That sounds like such a small thing, but the Product Groups have worked together to bring voice to the desktop, eliminating the need to remember phones numbers and connecting people in the ways that they want to be connected. This has all been brought together in using familiar user interfaces so end user training is vastly accelerated over the competition.

 These are exciting times and I look forward to sharing it with you. Please feel free to post questions you may have about the products. I want to share the answers with everyone because chances are you aren't the only one with the same question.

Thanks again for visiting!

- Chad

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Vladistav, I'm not exactly sure what you are looking for in a SIP-gate. However, have you taken a look at SER (SIP Express Router)? SER is an open source SIP proxy and redirect server. You can find more information about it at http://www.iptel.org/ser. I've used this product in the past to integrate LCS with Asterisk VoIP servers. Additionally, you might even be able to virtualize this server so as not to deploy additional hardware.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Typically small-biz have a PBX (3-15 external lines) without SIP support. To deploy SIP over existing phone infrastructure we must deploy SIP<>PSTN gateway. I see the only way to do it with the help of 300-400 USD hardware appliance. Small-biz won't buy new SIP-enabled PBX for 3000+ USD.

  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2007
    There is no SIP-gate for smallbiz. I know only one 300 bucks priced D-Link SIP-gate with poor GUI and  documentation like a fifty-bytes readme.txt.