Interact 2008

I attended Interact 2008 in San Diego today and will be at RSA tomorrow. Interact offers a nice view into what Microsoft is doing in the UM and UC spheres, with lots of good information provided in a number of sessions, including some frank comments on areas in which Microsoft needs to bolster its UM and UC offerings.

Some observations:

- Microsoft views Exchange as a mature offering that, in some ways, will act as a "mentor" for OCS. OCS will steal some best practices from Exchange, such as the capabilities of Systems Center, improvement of the command line interface in OCS and working with common partners for both platforms. Microsoft's goal is to make both Exchange and OCS "look like they come from the same vendor".

- Exchange and OCS share some of the same architectural focus and engineering, but different business pressures force them to be "out of phase" with one another, although Microsoft anticipates coordinating Exchange and OCS to a greater degree in the future.

- Saw an impressive demonstration of Exchange UM in action; each server can support about 10,000 users.

- There are currently 71,316 users at Microsoft on Exchange UM.

In all, Interact 2008 was definitely time well spent even if San Diego was cold and windy today.