Forum Discussion
On-Prem Unified Messaging
Hey Eric - thanks for being our first poster out here. Its a fair question you ask. The challenges really are one of maintaining a legacy feature set. UM has served our customers well but with each year in passing, management of that code base was essentially eating away at innovation. We decided with this release that we would make it easier for customers to harness a modern cloud infrastructure while staying on-premises. This would allow our teams to innovate in other areas. It also gave us a chance to improve customer sat because there have been concerns about how the service worked. We appreciate your feedback and if you want to share the impact in terms of customers, etc - happy to note that feedback.
Hey Eric - thanks for being our first poster out here. Its a fair question you ask. The challenges really are one of maintaining a legacy feature set. UM has served our customers well but with each year in passing, management of that code base was essentially eating away at innovation. We decided with this release that we would make it easier for customers to harness a modern cloud infrastructure while staying on-premises. This would allow our teams to innovate in other areas. It also gave us a chance to improve customer sat because there have been concerns about how the service worked. We appreciate your feedback and if you want to share the impact in terms of customers, etc - happy to note that feedback.
My org is one such that will simply have to consider completely abandoning Skype for Business and Exchange due to this change. You have to remember that there is a customer-base that is not permitted to use any cloud service for any reason. There are financial institutions, government agencies... it just seems hard to believe that it is as the team states in your announcement post; that all your customers "recognize they will move eventually to the cloud" for their core and sensitive systems, like voice and email. This is not a true, nor accurate, sentiment. Is there going to be a solution for those customers, or is the trajectory of the product and Microsoft one of cloud-only, and this is more of a "let's just rip off the bandaid" type situation?
Just be straight with us. If it is the latter, your customers just need to know. Maybe it's an opportunity for a competitor to step in, though I'm not sure who that would be these days really.
Dear Paul,
Its okay if u want to go to the future but you shouldn't give up your Past. Unified Messaging was a game changer for a decade and now you (as the Microsoft guy) Announce its Replacement without any On-Premise option?. actually this method or type of change warns me about the MS higher Technology Decision Makings. what i mean ? i mean is there any guarantee with this part of subject! that at least does Microsoft like to release an On-Premise version of its Products like S4B or Exchange? or moving slowly and SILENTLY to the Cloud? is this the time we (The customers) should be thinking of Open Source Services and Products as MS thinking about its Private Could Servers that Offering Public Services????
yes Private Servers i name it. you know why ? because there is no total control on the Server or Services from the customer view or at least thered is no guarantee about the true reall 100% connectivity over the internet, because Internet is an Unmanaged Network Yet. did you forget it ? or just because your GP network and your Internet connectivity is well and you don't have Internet disconnections you have the right to decide for your customers? isn't it rude enough to stop moving On-Premise Lover Customers to your cloud? over the Unmanaged Internet ???
many of Customers not even like but Want it to be able to manage the total system at their own way. this move and many moves like this...i am not agreed at all. and for the part of code handling i have to say sorry for MS thinking. hey bill Gates...wake up....is this the Company you wanted to show to the globe ? a team of developers who think of costs of holding your Heritage, Upgrading it and even making it better ! or just holding the good and ripping the BAD ! i just had a bad feeling when i read your post at the first time and even now after about 10 times reading it i have the same sense. because it seems you (the MS company) are tired of game of Codes and Apps. and Money is everything for you.
Really Really need you to wake up from this monopoly game. we need the UM or at least its new version of UM in our Datacenter.
let us rest at safe side without thinking about your Cloud based decisions. you can offer everything over the cloud but dont just rip the private could.
if this is really your decision to have the cloud and rip the on-premise, so...why you don't just rip the on-premise ! are you afraid of money again !!
guys, this isn't fair at all.
at least think more, do more, and do more and do More, till you find a way to understand you don't have to replace a feature of an on-premise Service and fill it with an online version of same feature in the coud.
- completely agree. hopefully MS will find the way back to good on-prem software itself and if not some countries force them to do so.
This has me perplexed, what about countries such as India where hosted voicemail through EXO UM was never available hence making the need for Exchange on-premise or is Azure Voicemail approved in such countries where EXO UM was not ?
- Just a small reply to you Paul:
When you say: "management of that code base was essentially eating away at innovation". If you taka a look of the Lync 2013 till S2015, the changes there has been... <imho> not so big </imho>. Many features are still on the same level on S2015 as they were in L2013 (or even 2010). And when looking for the future, do you really expecting to see something real innovative appears on the Skype? And I mean something else than the final nail into Skype's chest, and after that Teams is the only available.
Cannot agree more to Eric, as there are companies who are unable to use cloud services, so removing the UM from them sounds very strange. Of course, only you do have the statistics available to see how many that kind of customers you still have. Perhaps that number is very low and so is the impact for your customers. - I'd also like to add a voice to saying I'm not keen on the idea of taking voicemail off premesis.
Just for example it could leave you in the situation of your site loosing internet connectivity and having phones from your on premises SfB servers but no voicemail, not a common scenario perhaps but likely one where someone may need to leave you an urgent voicemail internally about the connectivity problems.
It's certainly a nice idea, and I can see it being useful for those transitioning to cloud. But there needs to be an on premises alternative for those who are not.
Paul Cannon wrote:Hey Eric - thanks for being our first poster out here. Its a fair question you ask. The challenges really are one of maintaining a legacy feature set. UM has served our customers well but with each year in passing, management of that code base was essentially eating away at innovation. We decided with this release that we would make it easier for customers to harness a modern cloud infrastructure while staying on-premises. This would allow our teams to innovate in other areas. It also gave us a chance to improve customer sat because there have been concerns about how the service worked. We appreciate your feedback and if you want to share the impact in terms of customers, etc - happy to note that feedback.
Thank you very much sir for the response! I agree greatly with your statement to remove legacy components that hold products back from evolving. I also agree personally with leveraging the cloud for those services as well. Perhaps an idea as a feature of Skype for Business Server 2019 would be adding a server role to host a modern VM service such as Azure VM. Just an idea that I have.
On a good note though, once I am off of work tonight I believe I will be spinning up some new servers at home :)
