round pegs in square holes - Simon Booth's blog about custom apps for unified communications.
All posts and opinions are my own, and do not represent my employer.
So I just noticed that Lync Server has J# as a pre-req – this fills me with yucky feelings, Am I the only one who feels uncomfortable with a pre-req that doesn’t support the OS we are required to install to and is due to expire support long before the product itself?
I quote a few nuggets of nastiness:
From the redist download page :
Supported Operating Systems:Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition;Windows Server 2003, Standard x64 Edition;Windows Vista Business 64-bit edition;Windows Vista Enterprise 64-bit edition;Windows Vista Home Basic 64-bit edition;Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition;Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition;Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
From the J# Developer center homepage :“Product Announcement - January 10, 2007: … Visual J# 2.0 Redistributable Second Edition is targeted for release in the second quarter of 2007, with support continuing through to 2017 (5 years mainstream and 5 years extended support) on EN-US locales.”
One of the most exciting things I saw in the Lync launch last week which really got me excited was the ProtoSphere virtual world offering from Proton Media
This is a virtual reality world application that has been in use in the life sciences industry for collaborating on scientific models for quite a while. Just recently they integrated with Microsoft Lync (for outbound audio dialing) and the potential here is amazing.
My long term vision for UC is where remote workers (which I have been for most of my career, and it seems every major corporation is trending towards) are afforded the same level of interaction and collaboration as their office bound counterparts. Within the physical space, Telepresence rooms like the Polycom OTX provide a truly immersive collaboration experience for participants in the rooms, but despite interoperability with Lync – the experience for the remote participants is still a second class citizen, and far from immersive. http://www.polycom.com/products/telepresence_video/telepresence_solutions/immersive_telepresence/otx300.html?vid=Video_OTX300_Sexy
The next logical step of all this is to combine immersive Telpresence in the real world with a remote virtual experience – eventually of course everyone will work from home and the physical spaces will go away.
Another embodiment is for the remote worker outside fixed meetings- Microsoft Research has this – see Scott Hanselmans ‘virtual persona trolley’ / Social Proxy :
