Chad Smith wrote:
What do you all think - useless bloat, a new way for MS to acheive vendor-lock-in, a valuable feature, or what?
Useless bloat vs. valuable feature? For any individual I suppose any "advanced" feature falls into one or the other of these two categories. Depends a lot on what you do for a living and how you do it.
Vendor lock-in? I don't know... Cisco is actually very friendly to open standards in general. Despite being the dominant player in networking hardware (about 80 - 85% market share worldwide, IINM) they have a pattern of innovating, submitting the innovation to a standards body, and then adopting the resulting standard while deprecating their proprietary implementation. Not in all cases do they drop the proprietary protocol entirely, but they always support the resulting standards.
I don't know a lot about their CallManager line in particular, but that has been the pattern with their routers, switches, and wireless gear.
If you take a look at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps556/products_programming_reference_guides_list.html
you will see that they have freely posted a lot of material for programmers to use to interface with their products, so there would seem to be little reason that open-source competition would be locked out other than a failure to apply resources to the problem.
Having said all that it should be obvious that this particular feature will be a function of Outlook, since that application would be the one to know your schedule. And since the open-source world is roughly 5 - 10 years behind MS in this product area, I wouldn't expect to see any *actual* open-source competition for quite some time, if ever.
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