Although our next generation of Office Communicator may be very cool, there’s sometimes no accounting for the actual meeting. Very funny.

I remember being out in the street during the recent snow trying to figure out if the roads were passable. I didn’t fancy my chances (in the Prius) but another bloke who was there too said “he didn’t have much option” but to get to the office for meetings (despite the illogical thought process I let the comment pass).

It’s an obvious set-up to a story about unified communications, but it really did prove it’s worth to me over the week or so of “travel chaos”. It’s very easy for ‘softies to switch mode and work online rather than face-to-face which is great in those conditions, but in normal conditions also makes it a lot easier to pull together vTeams and remote teams more consistently.

Anyway, I forgot to blog about it but then my memory was jogged when I saw this post from Brett with some interesting info on how the use of OCS R2 has helped control our costs. Excerpt:

“In Microsoft UK, the Sales & Marketing and Support Group has seen average cost reductions of over 50% in both T&E and Telecoms, generating savings of £3.6m saving year on year (over the period from November 2008 to Oct 2009 compared to the previous 12 months)

· T&E costs savings are 51% T&E (£3.3m)

· Telecom costs savings are 54% Telecoms (£320k)

The cost savings are due to the adoption of Unified Communication and Live Meeting and changes in the travel policy. The travel policy changes resulted in many business meetings being hosted online and therefore business continued as before.”

And then I saw Peter Klein’s comments on Microsoft’s great quarterly results:

“Our continuing commitment to managing costs allowed us to drive earnings performance ahead of the revenue growth.”

OCS is genuinely useful to me - and clearly useful to the business. I still prefer face to face meetings if I can (as presumably most humans would), but there’s convenience and continuity capabilities that I prize. Have a look at it in on-premise form or as part of or online services.