There was such a strong resemblance to Twitter that users asked whether Gold Systems could give users the ability to post to Twitter through OCS. The answer was “yes” and the solution was baked into the Communicator client in very short order, as was a link to Facebook as well. Gold Systems packages the features as the “Social Center” application for OCS. Terry’s informal name is “Twitter for the Enterprise.” He posits that some IT departments will find it a preferable way for employees to post to Twitter because it adds authentication (meaning that employees are authenticated through Active Directory when they log into OCS). It also gives the company the ability to filter posts for inappropriate language or to apply business rules that can detect other compliance issues, for example, if a company representative is about to make a notoriously forbidden “forward-looking statement” that violates SEC disclosure laws.

You can view a demonstration of Social Center in this YouTube video. I’m also preparing an advisory to provide more detail into the origin and evolution of this example of “recombinant applications” built on the OCS framework.

They used to call it “Dogfooding” in reference to the test of whether, after months of market testing and experimentation, the “dogs actually eat the dog food.” I’m told now that the accepted term of art is “pudding-ing” in reference to the adage “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” In either case, it seems that Microsoft’s go-to-market partners provide the best testimonials regarding the uptake and financial benefits of implementing Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS, for short).

Aspect Software has been very forthcoming with statistics, both on the speed of deployment and the financial benefits. More than 1,100 of the company’s 1,800 employees work in offices that provide them with client-side access to OCS and the uptake has been dramatic (as illustrated graphically here).

Aspect is realizing cost savings from reduced travel (reflected in the growth of “AV Conferencing” in both minutes and sessions and increases in what the company likes to call UC-to-UC phone calls – which Opus Research would simply refer to as “VoIP” or “IP-telephony”. Ultimately the savings result from replacement of traditional PBXs and eliminated of the associated maintenance and licensing costs.

In Gold Systems, Microsoft has another showcase OCS deployment. As founder Terry Gold explains on his blog: “I’m going to see the day very soon I think where we have no phone lines, and our communications expenses will be less than it was our first few years in business.” For Gold systems, he reports, the resulting savings for elimination of switched phone lines was already “over $3,000 a month” in February 2009, and was expected to reach “$6,000 a month once we disconnect our old voice T1s and POTs lines.” As Terry explains, “we’re a small company – our customers will save a lot more.”

The savings in hard costs – communications and travel expense – are enough to justify a serious look at the combination of Voice over IP and defacto conferencing that is referred to as Unified Communications. Plus the “UC” umbrella covers a number of squishier savings that result from more efficient integration of back office business processes with phone systems, but any claims of specific savings must be subjected to rigorous cost analysis.

When the switch is turned and the PBXs are decommissioned, employees have effectively been forced into the world of IP-telephony. As with any new technology, they have embarked on their own mission of discovery to determine how to make the new system work best for them. Letting the users define their own applications and call flows is part of the magic of recombinant telephony.