Peachy Response Point Training
Now that I’ve successfully recovered from the feast-o-rama that was Thanksgiving here at the Funcave, here’s a recap of my latest Response Point encounter..
The day before Thanksgiving, yours truly made the 8 hour roundtrip to the swank-ola Microsoft offices in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta for a half-day Hands-on Lab delivered by Joe “Captain Unified” Schurman himself. Yes, that means I finally got my grubby mitts on some genuine Response Point hardware, at least for a few hours
In all, it was well worth my time and fuel to attend. Simply getting the chance to compare the different OEM flavors of Response Point was a big plus.
Admittedly, the labs were super short, and barely scratched the surface of Response Point. But that’s only an issue if you are the type of person who simply does what’s laid out for you in the given labs and isn’t willing to explore any more on your own. Most of all, I was itching to dig into the administrative interface for Response Point. Thanks to the brevity of the provided labs, I had plenty of time to do some Official Funcave Dissecting on the Response Point software tools.
The real saving grace tho, was having someone like Joe, who is an MVP in Office Communications Server with loads of experience and a true breadth of knowledge of VoIP, delivering the training. He dropped several nuggets of info for anyone who was paying attention that were pure gold.
Best of all, thanks to the exposure to RP I had on Wednesday, I’m already mapping out system configurations for several RP prospects that I’ll be contacting this week.
|| posted by chris under business, freebie, hardware, unified comm || || ||
Thanks for the report on RP Chris. Here in Cincinnati our closest location choices for the road show were either Chicago or somewhere in NC (basically requiring a flight) and unfortunately Chi-town was booked the day the announcement came out.
So your replay and experiences are of some value to many like me who didn’t have the opportunity. What hardware was the most desirous? Any dogs? Care to share some of the gold you were attentive enough to hear? Please share your opinions and a little meat to go with the appetizer of this post.
Many thanks - Dale
comment by Dale Unroe — November 26, 2007 @ 10:33 am
Hey man - glad to see you are on-board and rockin with RP…makes sense with your interest in mobility…
FYI - love to have you join up in our Yahoo! RP group to carry on the conversation:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/responsepoint/
ski ya later….harrybbbbb
comment by Harry Brelsford — November 26, 2007 @ 5:15 pm
Chris,
I have been beta testing RP for almost 6 months. I can tell you that my experience YTD is that the Syspine equipment is head and shoulders ahead of the D-link equipment for reliability and sound quality. I have not tried any equipment yet from Aastar. I am meeting with Robert Brown and Bill Posey of the RP development team tonight. I have also worked with Joe Schurman, Jeff Smith and Veronica Buckley on presenting RP at the MS Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver back in July. This has been a great team to work with. I co-presented with Jerry Moore of CMP (the only Syspine distributor) two weeks ago to a telecom group and it was well received and I think a little feared. These telecom guys have made a lot of money on what they call MACs (moves, adds, and changes). RP will allow most small businesses to do it themselves.
I think that there are a few features that will be added in the near future, many of which will depend on the OEMs to add. Things like a headset port, integrated bluetooth, and a receptionist phone that can at least show when handsets are in use. This could even be a soft phone feature just so long as it is available. I’ll keep you posted.
"The IT Department for Your Business"
TM
comment by Trevor Dierdorff — November 26, 2007 @ 6:57 pm