OC CIO Roundtable Minutes 12-10-09

1993-2009
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
December 10, 2009 meeting

Present: Chris Andreozzi, Jennifer Curlee, Michael Tasooji, William Zauner, Sean Brown, Joe Cracchiolo, Carmella Cassetta, Dave Phillips

The minutes of this and other meetings are available online at the Peer Consulting Group’s website, www.peergroup.net, with links to other material, when available.

We have volunteers to introduce the following topics, starting in January:

1/14/10 IT alignment with the CEO/business Sean Brown
2/11/10 e-Collaboration, with web 2.0 Jim Sutter
3/11/10 On-demand computing Jeff Hecht/Jeff Reid
4/08/10 Developing an IT strategy Rich Hoffman
5/13/10 IT Governance Carmella Cassetta

We still need volunteers for the following:
Web 2.0/Web 3.0
Go Green with ?
Service Catalog
CIO longevity (or lack thereof)

Topic: Unified Communications (UC)

Chris Andreozzi, Knowledge Centrix, gave us a great interactive demo of what UC is, as you will see from his slides “What UC is what U get”, or more or less! It used to be that video conference was all U got, but now we have office voice mail, phone voice mail, office e-mail, texting, instant messaging, social media communiqués, etc.. Depending on what communication and messaging systems you integrate, UC could make it better. Basically, UC makes real time systems (like instant messaging) share information with e-mail and voice mail over the same network, using VoIP to cut down on traditional phone bills, and reduces travel costs. Not all organizations are seeing the ROI – perhaps because they don’t know how to attach a $ figure to them - but lots are seeing real benefits. I recommend you take a look at Chris’ slides and read the article in the Sept. 15th CIO magazine. To start a UC project, you will need at minimum Microsoft Active Directory, at least 1 server

A number of the members had experimented with UC projects. Joe Cracchiolo used Office Communicator for internal use, and Microsoft MPLS for external usage. William Zauner looked at Cisco a few years ago, but settled on Shoretell because the licensing costs were far less. He is impressed with Microsoft products for the integrated solutions. Care must be taken with Exchange as the growth is huge – you need to set voicemail retention policy early on.

Thank you, Chris, for a great interactive presentation. Chris' slides are at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio .

See you on January 14, 2010 – 7:00 a.m. in the RJTCompuquest conference room at:
940 South Coast Dr., Suite 260, Costa Mesa, CA 92626.
It’s opposite the Carl Strauss Brewery on South Coast Dr. If you are driving N on the 405, take the SOUTH COAST DR EXIT, and turn RIGHT on South Coast Dr. If you are driving S on the 405, take the FAIRVIEW EXIT, make a LEFT over the freeway and turn RIGHT on South Coast Dr. Turn LEFT on Greenbrook, and immediately right into the parking lot of 940. Proceed to the 2nd floor to Suite 260.