Greener Pastures

What will your Response(Point) be?

So have you seen the ResponsePoint that Microsoft Recently announced? This promises to be pretty darn cool stuff. Long, I have been saying there needs to be a VoIP product designed for the SMB market place that fits the SMB mold and becomes part of the toolset. There are a couple of options on tap already, Packet8, Vonage (maybe), trixbox and home brew…btw I love Trixbox, with all the nerd-vittles customizations…but alas they are not built to be INTEGRATED with Microsoft Small Business Server!!! So Microsoft has developed, in partnership with a couple of hardware vendors, ResponsePoint. Click on the link for whatever info is available on it. The one thing I don't see is that it is designed to be separate and apart from the Small Business Server. BAD MOVE as that also assumes DIY VoIP for SMB…and this I am against. My biggest pet peeve for Packet8, besides Credit Card billing is that there really is no Channel built for partners to leverage their experience and market reach. The one thing I can say for Microsoft is that they maximize the Channel, from the enterprise down, and especially the smaller marketplace. Microsoft's Small Business reach is dependent entirely on it's Partners and especially us Small Business Specialists to sell and deliver Small Business Server and the Small Business Desktop to the Market.

I hope for EVERYONE's sake that Microsoft is building the ResponsePoint to plug in to SBS. If they miss this boat, then they really don't get small business. By reviewing what info is available there is still some time for it, but it does not look good for SBS'ers.

So let's look at features that I think it ought to have…

1. SBS Management Console integration
2. Switchboard
3. Exchange Integration (begs the question on CRM Small Business Edition integration as well)
   1. Email, calendar, contacts, to-do list (the whole Unified Communications thing)
   2. Mobile integration, so that it knows that (fill in generic name here) is out on her/his SmartPhone and automagically forwards calls to him/her.
   3. Organization awareness, so that for example it knows, through ActiveDirectory who is the boss of personX and who their assistant is and who are alternative contacts for personX and automagically offers them up as alternatives to leaving a message.
   4. Distrobution Group aware, so that when it's a snow-day, the boss can call the office and using a series of choices it will call out to all the employees and let them know not to bother coming in, but instead werk from home, and oh by the way PersonX will be on her/his Smartphone all day, forward that ext. over to them…
4. Billing integration, so that it can create a report for those people who are in time-sensitive businesses and they can bill accordingly…(perhaps directly to Office Accounting and Small Business Financials)…out of the box!!!no third party app for that, now for other accounting apps, perhaps make them build it…
5. Multi-Provider config. This is one thing I particularly like about Trixbox and the tutorials on nerd Vittles, they say have multiple VoIP line vendors, that way in case one dies or is unavailable you can still pick up the phone and get dial-tone from another vendor, and keep multiple accts open. I really like that idea, and this should have the ability to configure a secondary outbound vendor, just in case…

Fortunately I have not seen ANYTHING in real life about this product, have not even seen the demo/walk through press announcement yet, but will soon enough. I just hope the plan is not to sell this through the retail channel like BestBuy (4 Biz), Staples, etc. That would be such a wrong move and poor message to the Loyal and dedicated SBSers in the Channel.