With Microsoft and Nortel just announcing that they are going to be teaming up on a unified communications partnership, one has to wonder what Microsoft has to offer here. Can you make a phone call directly from an Outlook contact? Can you reply to an email via voice instead of an email reply? Can you respond to a voicemail message with a canned email reply? Can your voicemail messages be transcribed and transcoded and sent to your wireless phone in the field? Can your wireless PDA receive email messages transcoded from a voicemail message? Lotsa neat options to ponder here.
Not yet -- but with a "unified" communications front, perhaps office workers with Nortel telecom systems and Microsoft servers will be able to do this someday soon. Since both are giants in their respective fields, its good to see Nortel so something innovative for once, with all the recent accounting troubles it has seen.
