Office Communications Server beta coming soon

Yesterday it was announced publicly that the Office Communications Server 2007 beta will be released this month. I have been working on the beta of OCS as a support engineer since December and I can tell you that we are taking unified communications to a new level. OCS 2007 will continue support Remote Call Control, but will now also have tighter integration with PBX systems. OCS will enable Voice over IP (VoIP) from the desktop or VoIP phone to then be routed to a VoIP system, or with a media gateway, go out the existing PBX system.

So, you say, big deal! Several other vendors have been able to do that. Well, mwe have taken it one step further. With presence integration in products like Outlook, Word, and SharePoint, you can now choose to click and im, e-mail, or call a person right from that spot. No need to switch applications. You are reading an e-mail from someone, you can now decide how you want to respond and initiate that action right from the e-mail. Add Exchange 2007 to the picture with its Unified Messaging capabilities and you have a truely powerful Unified Communications system. This means that telephony will stop being a seperate set of services. Telephony will start integrating and the telephone will start working for you instead of against you. Let's also note that Microsoft is working with some of the biggest names in the telephony business.

 For more information I recommend you look at https://www.microsoft.com/uc