Note: Although I haven’t had the “pleasure” of using the Microsoft Communicator, I was an avid user of Microsoft Messenger until I discovered Twitter.

I’ve created a ton on simple ESME clients (ranging from VBA to PL/SQL to Zoho Creator) and usually the integration focuses on sending messages. An integration of an IM client based on this foundation doesn’t make sense, because both systems are too closely related to one another at this level. A deeper integration might be necessary.  Another possible integration might be one in which groups from Microsoft Communicator might be used to create groups in ESME and vice-versa.

Use Cases

Let’s look at a few more use cases and see where the integration might lead to.

Use Case 1: Basic integration

Assumptions

1. Both systems are present in a large multinational enterprise with multiple divisions.

Steps:

1. A sales person gets a question from a customer about a new product “Lumberjack” from an another division.  The sales person herself has no knowledge about this product.
2. The sales person asks fellow sales reps via an IM session in MS Communicator and they also have no idea about the new product. Thus, the sales person’s own social network is of no help.
3. The sales person opens his ESME pane in the MS Communicator and searches for the word “Lumberjack” in the ESME stream.
4. The sales person sees a list of messages that either contain the word “Lumberjack” or are tagged with the word “Lumberjack”.
5. By clicking on a particular ESME message, the sales person can see the latest ESME messages from this individual.
6. The sales person can then reply via ESME  to individuals who have created the relevant messages.

This loose integration is primarily based on embedding the ESME UI into the UI of the Microsoft Communicator

Use Case 2: Tighter integration

Assumptions

1. ESME and the Microsoft Communicator environments have a common user-id base. Without a common identity pool, the integration isn’t going to work.
2. Both systems are present in a large multinational enterprise with multiple divisions.

Steps:

This use case continues at the end of the first use case.

1. When the sales person selects an ESME message, the user interface also shows communications-relevant information (including presence data) from Microsoft Communicator.  If the user is available, then the sales person could start a video-conference or call that individual via Microsoft Communicator.

The integration is deeper and involves merging the data from ESME and Microsoft Communicator. In all likelihood, this integration would use ESME’s REST-API in a Microsoft development environment.  I had a quick look for details on extending MS Communicator UI functionality but didn’t find anything. I assume that it is there.

There is also a Unified Client Communications API (UCC API) for the Microsoft Communicator which might allow ESME bots to use UCC functionality.

Summary

It is the combination of the two collaborative metaphors that has the greatest value.  As Mike Giotti suggests  there should be movement towards a tighter integration between “unified communications and collaboration platforms” . I’m assuming that many purely micro-blogging platforms will not survive.  I think ESME’s focus on being a white-label microblogging tool that be easily integrated into a variety of platforms and tools (just take a look at posts in the ESME blog about clients) has  in the long term a greater chance for success.

Larger vendors such as IBM would have to break from its UC-centric thinking around presence as would Microsoft. For Microsoft however this type of move is almost unimaginable given the centricity of OCS around SIP/SIMPLE and Microsoft’s reluctance to integrate and interoperate with other vendors on a level playing field when it comes to presence. Oracle remains a dark horse as does SAP, although ESME is a nice start (congrats BTW to the people involved in ESME and to Dennis Howlett who seems to be the proud mother at the moment).

BTW – blushing wildly at last statement. Never seen myself as ‘mother’ before.