Microsoft's Office Communicator Blows Away IP Phones
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Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be easily integrated into a telephony or VoIP system so that all call activity is captured in CRM. We recommend Microsoft Office Communicator as it simplifies and automates the process of call data capture for the end-user as well as balances quality with cost of deployment. It outstrips the closest competitor’s offering as demonstrated by an independent survey undertaken earlier this year.
Psytechnics, a reputable testing company, compared Microsoft’s Office Communicator solution to Cisco IP desk phones. The tests used Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 soft phone.
The tests were of both a subjective and objective flavour. In the subjective portion, 32 individuals
Not only can it be as good
as a desktop phone, but it can actually be better if you're using the right software.
Benjamin Ellis
VP of marketing and product management
Psytechnics |
made calls under a variety of controlled conditions. They used American and British English, and spoke with and without background noise. The calls travelled over six types of network connections that simulated real-world conditions, in terms of factors like packet loss and jitter, that are typical with global wide area networks. Testers then rated the quality of the calls on a scale of one through five, representing poor through excellent. The objective portion used algorithms that reproduce the results of human testers with 95 percent accuracy, but don't get tired as quickly, to perform tests in larger volumes. The combined tests are typical analyses under the ITU G.1050 standard for evaluating multi-media transmission performance over IP networks.
The outcome surprised the testers, according to Benjamin Ellis, VP of marketing and product management at Psytechnics. "We were kind of blown away by the results," he says. "To see that desktop software-based telephony outperformed an industry standard IP phone is actually quite a takeaway."
The takeaway should be particularly useful to enterprise telephony managers, who, Ellis says, are intensely interested in both the potential benefits and the risks of replacing desktop phones with soft phones. "Obviously desktop phones can be comparatively costly, and inflexible compared to deploying on a PC," he notes. "But when you're talking about voice, a really big recurrent issue for people is voice quality. People have expectations around the quality of a phone call. And if you deploy a voice system that doesn't meet those, you've got a major issue on your hands."
To Ellis the matter is all but settled. "For the people battling with the question of 'Can I get as good a quality from my software based telephony from a PC compared to a desk phone,' the answer is yes," he asserts. "Not only can it be as good as a desktop phone, but it can actually be better if you're using the right software."
These findings may not sit well with Cisco, whose 7961 model IP phone, working in conjunction with a standalone CallManager setup, served as the tests' basis for comparison. "The reason for the Cisco phone being in there is that you really have to compare [the soft phone] relative to something, so we picked a fairly industry standard IP phone that an enterprise might typically use, so it gives people a feeling of what it's like relative to a desktop phone."
