VoIPNorm's Collaboration Blog

Kinect for Windows SDK Beta

Well its finally here. The Kinect for Windows SDK beta has been a while coming since the first Kinect was hacked just a few days after the initial launch but it is finally here. Its great to see Microsoft Research listening to the community to provide this free SDK.

My hope is that a UC developer out there somewhere sees the potential for the Kinect in the UC space especially with Lync. With it’s a ability to track sound and depth perception I have to think there is an application tie with Lync to take Telepresence to a place its never been before.

This SDK includes the following features (From the download site):

Raw sensor streams.Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.
Skeletal tracking. The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view make it easy to create gesture-driven applications.
Advanced audio capabilities. Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.

Download it here:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx

Comments welcomed.

VoIPNorm

Microsoft Analytics for Twitter

Here is a great new free tool from Microsoft that plugs directly into Excel. Although this isn’t really a UC product as such I still find it useful and interesting for helping run my blog and other social network activities. In the example I did below I did a simple hash tag search on #lync and #jabber to see which of the two is generating more interest on Twitter. No surprises for which one came out on top.

With the recent interest in social mining of sites like Twitter I though this was an interesting free tool and worth talking about.

With this FREE add-in, you can:

Perform up to 5 parallel Twitter Searches (limited to 1500 results per query per day).
Drive ad-hoc analysis of tweets by day, by hour, by tweeters, by #hashtags and @mentions.
Customize your views (using slicers, DAX formulas or reference tables).

Limitations

Twitter search queries are limited to the past 4 - 7 days and a maximum of 1500 tweets per day.
Available for Excel 2010 only.

You need to download the Twitter plugin for Excel as well as Power Pivot for Excel which are both free.

Twitter plugin:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26213

Power Pivot for Excel:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=7609

Sample hash tag search:

VoIPNorm

Find a Microsoft UC User Group

There has been a big uptake in interest around Microsoft UC focused User Groups recently. The Lync resource page has been updated to include a directory to help folks find a group in their location.

http://lync.microsoft.com/en-us/Resources/Pages/user-groups.aspx

You can also find UC/Lync user groups here:

https://www.technicalcommunity.com/Pages/groups.aspx

If there is not a group in your location may be its time you started one!

Also check out the new community page to see the latest Lync related activity on the web.

http://lync.microsoft.com/en-us/launch/Pages/social.aspx

VoIPNorm

Lync Training and Adoption Web Site

Back in OCS R2 when Microsoft released adoption material it was a great tool to have in your back pocket to help with rollouts. With the release of Lync it has been taken a step further with a complete web site focused on adoption. The site has a collection of great tools for a Lync rollout including workbooks, tools and apps (which I will talk about later). I have a favorite saying in, “Organizations over estimate the administration involved in Lync and underestimate the effort required for adoption services and end user training.” Its not that you need hundreds of people running around training people but organizations have a tendency to overlook what's required for end user adoption. Not everyone is a super nerd and picks up UC or Lync as fast as us IT pros.

The tools on this site will go a long way in helping organizations get the biggest bang for their buck as they rollout Lync. I really like the workbooks and the table that describes who will be a high and low touch user for training. Although this will vary from organization to organization it’s a great starting point.

See the link below:

http://lync.microsoft.com/Adoption-and-Training-Kit/Pages/default.aspx

I wanted to make special mention of the Tools and Apps section. Each of the Apps adds value and a certain cool factor. Below is the complete list of Apps available. Most of them take advantage of the client API’s in some respect. One of the applications in particular is the Lync Custom Intranet Site. Although its not really an app as such it is a great adoption tool. It is a prebuilt help site that you can add your own content to and deploy internally at your organization. A great way to get end users the training they need to make a rollout go smoothly.

I will be going through some of the apps in more detail over the next couple of weeks.

VoIPNorm