Alex Little

Found out this morning that the OU are going to be trialling unified messaging with MS Office Communicator. Up until now we’ve basically used email (and occasionally the phone!) to get in touch with colleagues, but we’ve never had any actual presence information alongside this  – so you’re not sure if someone is actually in the office or away on holiday (people don’t always turn on their out-of-office auto-replies).

Some of us use MSG for getting presence info to see if people are around and available and having quick chats, but there hasn’t been a big take up in the organisation for using instant messaging (well, not for work anyway!). So I wonder how much the instant messaging aspects of Office Communicator will actually get used. I guess the integration with Outlook/Exchange would have a big bearing on this. If you know that someone is in the office and free you might just call or IM them instead – so maybe we’ll see a reduction in the number of emails flying around?

Not sure what all of this means for MSG and FlashMeeting (Office Communicator also has video-calling) – though I’m sure they’ll live on, especially for communicating with people outside the organisation.

Ever since I started working on MSG we’ve been asked for extra functionality to be added, most notably group-chat and option to have audio/video chat. We’ve always tried to resist giving in to these requests – on the basis that other IM services already do these things so why reinvent them, also, it’s all open source so if you can add them if you want!

However we’ve kinda given in to one of these, the video/audio chat one, the reason being that it’s actually relatively little work – we already have a service (FlashMeeting) which provides this type of functionality – so just need to link the 2 together. Well, we’ve nearly got this finished so when you’re in a chat session, there’s a one click launch flashmeeting – which automatically books the meeting and gives you the link to it…. so far so good – and also dubiously solves the group chat issues, since flashmeeting is multi-user rather than 1-1 (in fact better at multi-user than 1-1)…. but then we realised that we’ll only be able to apply this solution to the OpenLearn server.

The FlashMeeting and MSG OpenLearn servers have the exact same user base and account ids/emails etc all match up – so it’s quite trivial, however we run into problems with our general FlashMeeting and MSG servers as they have different user bases and even different policies on who can get accounts on each server. FlashMeeting accounts are only created by the FM team (you can’t self register – well, not without an OU email address?), but MSG has (or rather, will very shortly have) the ability for anyone to register – so we can’t then automatically auto create accounts the FM server. I know there are ways we _could_ do this but too many variables and too much if.. else if.. else if.. else.. code for my liking Another case for us to seriously look into whether OpenID and oAuth can really help solve these types of problem for us.

There are other services that we could use (recently found MeBeam – or rather they found us) which offer free to use, no-registration multi-user chat/audio/video facilities. However, we’ve not finally decided on any of these yet… and any other suggestions for services we could link to gratefully received

I’ve now started work on being able to launch an instant FlashMeeting when you are using MSG. This would enable users to start up video & voice capabilities directly from MSG, rather than having to visit the FlashMeeting site seperately and book a meeting. It would also be a workaround for (all) those who want voice chat and multi-user chat as you could just instantly fire up FlashMeeting to get these capabilities. Most of the structure is now in place, we just need to get a service built which would book the FlashMeeting (behind the scenes) and check the FM server has capacity etc. Hopefully we should be able to get this implemented soon