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.