I was an attendee at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference which was held in Boston last month amid torrential rain showers and lethal tunnel collapses. If only the partner conference was half as eventful! Maybe I expected too much, but there wasn’t exactly a torrent of earth-shattering announcements coming out of Microsoft during the event.

To some degree, this was due to the whacky world of Microsoft’s product release schedules - there just isn’t a lot happening this summer. Both Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 were released with much fanfare last November, drawing crowds of 225,000 attendees across 247 cities (according to Sanjay Parthasarathy, who ought to know). The guessing game of Windows Vista release continues although Microsoft still insists that it will release the business version of Vista in November 2006 and the consumer version in January 2007. Bill Gates added to the uncertainty by offering his 80 percent analysis, while Steve Ballmer insisted that Microsoft would never again leave such a long gap (5 years) between releases of its core operating system. “Count on it” he yelled - it’s probably best not to contradict him when he’s in that mood onstage.

In other conference news, Microsoft is clearly taking aim at its Office constituency of 400 million licensed users. Perhaps the most impressive push at the conference was the company’s “Unified Communications” strategy. Although it was limited to a breakout session at the conference, the presentation was so popular it became standing room only. In fact, the speakers asked all Microsoft employees present to identify themselves and then vacate their chairs to make partners comfortable - proper order! The showcase of Unified Communications across multiple devices was really well conceived and made me consider the Office 2007 beta for the first time. Microsoft’s vision for integrated office communications certainly isn’t new, but it’s clear that they have secured the basic elements to make it a reality (rather than a marketing spin to buy some time). The acquisition of Groove Networks certainly helped the cause, as new functionality seemed to spring from everywhere.

With such a pervasive product in the end user category, Microsoft is perfectly positioned to deliver integrated communications for information workers. As the presentation unfolded, many good working scenarios were explored - imagine combining all the most common software tools onto a single collaboration platform and blurring the distinction between each mode of communication. Take e-mail (Outlook), instant messaging (Messenger), video (Media Player), VoIP (Communicator), and web conferencing (LiveMeeting). Why should you have a separate contact list across all these applications and devices - isn’t each one just storing and accessing the same data in separate locations?

Furthermore, shouldn’t all your applications and devices be able to detect your real-time profile and route incoming messages accordingly? For example, if you’re out of the office at the Microsoft Partner Conference, why couldn’t your VoIP phone recognize your status is set to “On the Road” and route all voicemails to your PDA or email client? Why must we go through the routine of calling someone’s office phone, then their cell phone, then their IM, then leaving an email? It’s basically the same message each time, so shouldn’t the system be able to pass you through to the correct device depending on the recipient’s active profile? Sadly, Microsoft has given this very useful concept the horrible name of “Presence Awareness”. Somebody in the Marketing department should be boiled in hot oil for that linguistic monstrosity!

As if to drive the point home, most of us returned from this year’s partner conference to a slew of voice mails from family, telemarketers, and work colleagues that are dated and pretty useless by the time we receive them. One of the nice things about this Unified Communications strategy is that this level of ineffective communications will be exposed as laughable in a few years - just you wait. Of course, we need developers to build connected applications and ISVs to innovate around this notion before it can ever become a reality. This is why I came away from the conference thinking that developers should be looking at Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) with a fresh pair of eyes. Extending the Microsoft Office 2007 suite and building on the Unified Communications platform could well be the next wave of real innovation in the Microsoft partner ecosystem. Now where did I put that stack of Post-Its with scribbled notes from all my deleted voice mails last month? Hmmmmnnnn….