I had the privilege to get invited as a speaker to the MX-ONE Usergroup's annual meeting this year.It was my first time at the Swedish MX-ONE usergroup, I have been presenting at a Brum meeting, the Norwegian usergroup before.
Here is a link to my presentation please contact me if you have any questions around it.
The meeting was held in Nynäshamn just South of Stockholm in a beautiful place called Utsikten - "The view" - built originally as conference center for Telia. Around 100 persons attended.
Aastra started on Day 1 talking about how MX-ONE is doing, MX-ONE 5.0 and BluStar which will be released to partners shortly. 1,7 million lines of MX-ONE were shipped in 2011, and the server-based version of MX-ONE stands for 60% of this figure. MX-ONE 5.0 will support virtualization on VMware, and BluStar which is a "collaboration eco-system". Video calling is one of the main features and clients on PC and Apple iOs will be released to start with, there will also be a plug-in into Lync to make BluStar IM, audio or video calls.
After Aastra I entered the scene and talked about integration between MX-ONE and Lync. I described why organizations are deploying Lync even though they currently have a communication system from another vendor; some features of Lync were discussed such as the clients, mobile clients, federation and dial-in networking. I described the SIP trunk / Direct SIP connection that is certified and gave examples on what you can build using this integration.
I handed off to Jason Andersson who talked about trends and BOYD before we went to lunch, and after lunch Bo Martinsson from PTS talked about a new national numbering plan and Pär Ljunggren about education. After this the day continued with mini-seminars where you could select different seminars in smaller groups. I started out listening to Cygate talking about MX-ONE Lync integration, then Tele2 talking about MX-ONE Lync integration, and finally Relacom talking about MX-ONE Lync integration. And in between I held my seminar talking about - guess what? - MX-ONE Lync integration!
The organizations persenting are all selling MX-ONE systems and licenses, so it was not a big surprise that they praised the use of plugins into the Lync client. I was the only one saying that I do not like this approach, primarily based on the experience I had with plugins into OCS and Lync. It seems to be a hot topic for Aastra and the distributors while the end customers and members of the MX-ONE usergroup more silently followed the debate. About half of the people listening to my main seminar raised their hands at the question if they have MX-ONE and Lync deployed, but not too many claimed to have the two systems connected.
The event continued with dinner, some entertainment and indoor golfing, and day 2 started with Aastra showing some more of BluStar and the usergroup held its formal annual meeting. Basically I had a great time, learnt some now things about MX-ONE and met with a lot of nice people, thanks for inviting me!
