I just met with Microsoft to talk about what's new in their Response Point IP-PBX (News - Alert). They demo'ed the Aastra AastraLink RP phone system which works with Aastra (News - Alert) IP phones with the Response Point "magic" blue button embedded onto the phones. The magic button allows you to use speech-recognition to perform call transfers, directory lookups, and more. I met with Richard Sprague, Senior Director, Microsoft (News - Alert) Response Point and Xuedong Huang, General Manager, Microsoft Response Point to find out what's new and to see a demo of RP SP1.
Microsoft's Richard Sprague & Xuedong Huang (holding a cordless Aastra Response Point phone)
Microsoft gave TMC's (News - Alert) Michael Dinan and myself a demo of the Response Point system, which now features a fully-functional click-to-dial software application, and presence integration. They mentioned they recently added the ability to say "free411" and have it dial the free directory assistance service. Microsoft will be announcing some interesting Response Point news tomorrow at ITEXPO (News - Alert), so stay tuned. I'm also told Xuedong Huang will give an interesting keynote with some insights in the future direction Microsoft will be taking in (unified) communications. He said he will showing a video and it's a one-time only video and won't be available anywhere for viewing. So I'm hoping to capture the keynote session using my liveblogging mobile phone!
During our meeting, Richard Sprague mentioned he read my blog about live video blogging from ITEXPO using my Windows Mobile phone. So I gave him a quick demo and recorded the video. In the video you will see the table Microsoft setup at ITEXPO in a meeting room to demo the platform to the media and analysts attending the show. The video shows some Aastra phones and the AastraLink RP system, which I should mention features PoE (Power over Ethernet) ports for easy plug-and-play installs. Check out the video below, which even features a special hidden dial string that gets you into some uber secret auto-attendant featuring Bill Gates himself as the recorded voice prompts. Alas, my camera didn't pick up the dial string. Too bad Jerry Seinfeld doesn't make a special voice-over appearance.
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Too bad Jerry Seinfeld doesn't make a special voice-over appearance. 
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