Office Communcations Server 2007 to Interoperate with 80% of Global PBX Installed Base

  • Article

At Interop Las Vegas 2007, Microsoft Corp and 9 leading IP-PBX vendors announced plans to provide interoperability between their respective communications solutions; this represents more than 80% of the global PBX installed base. These industry leaders are integrating their IP telephony offerings with the Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 unified communications solution. This has been enabled via the release of an interoperability specification for Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 which was announced in March at Spring VoiceCon. The broad interoperability offered by this approach will enable customers to rapidly integrate their existing telephony investments with Microsoft’s software-based unified communications solution.

The benefits of such a deployment are the ability to seamlessly enjoy the existing telephony user experience in a way that is tightly integrated with the unified communications user experience, e.g.:

  • Intuitive user experience
  • Multi-modality (e.g. voice, video, text messaging, web collaboration)
  • Ad-hoc multi-party, multi-modal conferencing
  • Integration with business applications (e.g. Outlook)
  • Rich Presence
  • Mobility
  • Enhanced security

For customers who are unable to integrate their existing PBX infrastructure with Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft also announced a partnership with 3 market leading IP-PSTN Media Gateway vendors who can enable interoperability between almost any PBX and the Microsoft unified communications solution.

To read our full press release: https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/may07/05-22InteropRoadmapPR.mspx.

More information on the integration of traditional telephony and Microsoft unified communications solutions can be found in an upcoming White Paper.

- Russell Bennett

  Senior Program Manager