2010 New Year’s Resolutions
Happy New year everyone!
2009 was a great year for OCS. For how good it was and where we should be going in 2010 see Unified Communications 2009 - A year in review by my friend and fellow OCS MVP Joe Schurman.
It is customary at this time of the year to make predictions and resolutions for the new year. I’m not very good at predicting things so I thought I would list my professional resolutions for 2010. These are the technologies and software that I want to become more proficient at this year.
Silverlight – I think that Silverlight will make a great web based front end for OCS. With it you will be able to provide chats between customers and your tech support staff or your customer service agents. The eLearning modules on GotSpeech are done in Silverlight and it is about time I put some effort into mastering it. The Expression Studio suite of tool sis something that I want to sink myself into.
Powershell – I’ve played around with this some and I love it. I want to learn how to use it to automate OCS and Speech Server tasks. Still need to find a development environment for it that I like and feel comfortable with.
Brekeke PBX- This is something I want to install and learn how to use. I have an 8 port Dialogic Media Gateway in my home lab but I want to be able to setup the lab for direct SIP. First though I need a cheap (read free) SIP provider that I can use.
FreeSWITCH – Same reasons as above except that this is free and will allow small independent developers to setup their own environments without the costs of expensive hardware or software solutions. Many of my readers are using it so I need to know more about it. I’m looking forward to learning from the series that Brian has started on FreeSWITCH. I’m anxiously waiting for part 2.
UCMA 2.0 – This is the future of Speech development and I would like to delve deeper into it. I am convinced that there is going to be a huge need for developers that can enhance, extend and integrate OCS into enterprise level business processes. I would really like to get better at this and I am anxious to get my hands on the next release. I also think there will be a huge market this year for OCS/UCMA developer training. It would be very time consuming to develop OCS training but I think the need is there.
Then there are things like Wave 14 or OCS 2010, Office 2010, Exchange 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 that are just over the horizon. Also, there is WCF, WPF and Linq that I have been avoiding as they don’t fit that well with Speech Server. But with OCS which has a visual interface and the possibility of extending things like Communicator there is so much for me to add to to my tool belt. Its going to be a busy year and I will need to budget my time accordingly.
And lastly I want to blog more and put more time into GotSpeech.Net and GotUC.Net. I want to get out an speak more as well as evangelize all the fascinating things that make up doing Unified Communications the Microsoft way.
Yes, 2010 is looking like a busy year for me.