Triplesourced

Another week, another conference, this week we are over in London's docklands at the RSA Conference Europe. The show is a really big deal in the US, and the organisers are trying to increase its visibility over here.

The US show attracts keynotes from Bill Gates and other industry execs and while the UK show doesn't have keynotes of that calibre – they are coming close. Security guru Bruce Schneier has just been on stage and barracking the conservative UK audience for not asking enough questions. However a few nuggets did emerge including the factoid that apparently seven out of ten people would give away their password for a bar of chocolate! I've been thinking about that and yeah – why not – get a free Yorkie and then just change your password straight away – why not. Or just give a false password – they won't know until they try and do something with it and if they do well – they aren't going to tell you are they. The concept of free chocolate weighs heavy on my mind.

The three day show also includes a keynote from Frank Abagnale – he of Catch Me If You Can fame on Wednesday – which should be entertaining – apparently the man who made his name as a fraudster in the sixties, has had a very successful career as a security and anti-fraud expert – guess it takes one to catch one.

The launch of Microsoft's Office Communications Server at the IP07 conference yesterday was surprisingly more interesting than you'd think. The actual product is basically glorified Outlook/Exchange – with some presence and teleconferencing ability – but a good case study by the Tayside Fire and Rescue service helped to illustrate the benefits. Chief Fire Officer Stephen Hunter, explained how the service is using the system, in combination with smartphones, as a replacement for pagers for part-time firemen. Now the firemen know what sort of fire they are going to tackle before they get to the station and can work out whether to risk life and limb getting there in a hurry.

Mark Deakin, Unified Communications product manager, Microsoft UK, also somehow managed to make the demo entertaining and avoid any major cock-ups. The speed and quality of the teleconferencing images wasn't very impressive – but Deakin claimed that was down the set-up for the show rather than inherent problems with the product (why set up a demo for journalists that doesn't show the product at its best?).

You can see an excerpt from the demo here – Deakin's reference to Kenny Everett's character Brother Lee Love and his big hands was sort of lost on the telecoms hacks –but I appreciated it (the 360 degree camera that the OCS sytem is designed for has some amusing side-effects)

Chatting to analyst Clive Longbottom from Quocirca at IP 07, it seems that VoIP can be a complex beast – especially for smaller companies. Clive even goes so far as to say that reliability has been such as issue for smaller players that they have "ripped out" VoIP implementations. The full interview with ZDNet.co.uk news editor Richard Thurston should be up soon but here's a taster for now:

Down at the IP 07 show in London's Earls Court – we have been chatting to various industry luminaries about whether the whole convergence strategy pushed by the communications vendors is all it's cracked up to be in terms of cost savings and making real improvements to productivity.

Clive Longbottom, from analysts Quocirca had some interesting things to say on the subject of Voice over IP – particularly about whether merging voice and data networks has inherent security risks. Security group, the Jericho Forum, has warned about this issue, but Clive does not share their concerns – as you can see from the clip below.

Yes, it's that wonderful time of year again when chestnuts are ripening on the trees, golden leaves form a crunchy carpet underfoot for duffel-coated toddlers to frollick in, and the IT industry decides to hold four conferences in one week!!

Today we are down at the glorious Earls Court 2 (the answer to the question - what's worse than Earls Court 1 on a wet Tuesday morning) - to get in amongst the throng that is IP 07/IP Expo. What is the show about - good question - as far as we can make out - it's about telecoms, covergence and well, as the name suggest - all things IP.

We have been having some fun on the show floor ambushing hapless IT managers and quizzing them about their plans around convergence. For VoIP in particular, it seems that cost savings might not be the main driver anymore. There are a lot of up-front costs it seems in terms of hardware and services - and IT managers are seeing a move to VoIP as something they have to do - at the behest of senior managers or because of vendor pressure - rather than the huge savings that were promised a couple of years back.

More news, video and other good stuff to follow from the show soon.