Several days ago we released VoipNow 2 Beta. You can register and download beta here. The received feedback, judged on the number of received bugs is good. We gathered only four bugs till now from beta testers (we got no critical bug). VoipNow 2 changes some of the perceptions about Unified Communications systems.

In the past three-four months I gathered interesting feedback from people regarding Unified Communications. Let me share some with you:

– Unified Communications are hard to implement. Not really with VoipNow 2. You can have everything running in less than 20 minutes.

– When a system has too many components, their features are poor. I have to agree on this. I know many such examples: poor PBX features, poor email features, poor messaging, etc. When asking developers why is this the answer is usually “Small businesses need only basic features”. The truth is that Small Businesses need very powerful features, because Small Businesses rely on multi-role people. These people must have top tools in order to compete with larger companies. From the developing point of view the truth is that you can not easily build top features for five different components. Take a look at Microsoft, a company with plenty of resources – although Microsoft Exchange is a reference product, Communications Server does not deserve any attention. We want to deal only with voice, video, messaging and faxing and to integrate with top email servers using the Opened API.

– There is no real demand for Unified Communications. This is a funny one, but the truth is that many do not understand Unified Communications if they haven’t ever used such functions. Once they use it, they see their productivity and user experience boosting and obviously this changes in “I can not work without Unified Communications”.

I bet on Unified Communications. Anyone wants to bet against?