I "met" Bambi Francisco of CBS Marketwatch by phone last week, chatting in preparation for the Instant Messaging Planet Conference (see other story), and spoke with her yesterday at some length about Microsoft's launch today of Office 2003, coordinated with the release of Live Communication Server 2003. Bambi's story on the launch includes some prognostications by yours truly regarding LCS:

"Once you have Messenger integrated into Office, the scenarios are compelling," Boyd observed. Why would a corporation roll out Office and not take advantage of the instant messaging integration, Boyd asked. "It's a tough proposition to convince yourself not to go down this path."

Microsoft's integration of IM within the context of the typical information worker's desktop world -- Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and so on -- will create a real productivity gain, one that will be difficult for other products (at least in unintegrated form) to compete against:

• Reading a comment from a colleague in a Word doc under review, you learn she is online. With one click you are sharing the document with her in real-time and resolve her question immediately, freeing you both for other tasks.
  
• Noting a time conflict for a meeting, you open a real-time chat with the other three participants and rapidly get others to make room in their schedules, avoiding a lengthy email exchange perhaps spread over days.
  
• Receiving a critical request for information via email from a colleague in another department you notice he is online, and with one click you open a real-time video conference to help him resolve a pressing client issue.

These scenarios are functionality equivalent to those you can imagine with real-time collaborative solutions not tightly integrated with Office -- for example, use of, say, Lotus collaborative solutions involving Lotus Instant Messaging, Lotus Web Conferencing, and WebSphere Portal technologies -- but the scenarios would involve moving Office documents out of the desktop context and basically inverting the pattern of use. Instead of operating within the context of the Office document, the user would operate in a 'folder' or 'portal' context, manipulating the document, but not working from 'within' it.

So, I believe that Microsoft has raised the bar for the integration of real-time and 'slow-time' collaboration. It should prove to be an interesting few quarters as the value proposition for Microsoft's Live Communication Server and Office 2003 starts to penetrate the market and gain share of mind. Bambi's question about 'instant dominance' is dead on, since Microsoft's Office 2003 is clearly the high water mark for sophisticated real-time collaboration.