On May 30th,
I speculated that Windows Live Meeting 2006 was coming—the next version after Windows Live Meeting 2005. I was close;
Microsoft actually “skipped a year” and released Office Communicator 2007, a unified communications client that works in tandem with Office Communications Server 2007, also announced today.
This solution delivers a presence-based, enterprise VoIP “softphone” for secure, enterprise-grade instant messaging that allows for inter-company federation and connectivity to public instant messaging networks such as
MSN,
AOL and
Yahoo! It also enables one-to-one and multiparty videoconferencing, audioconferencing, and webconferencing. Office Communicator 2007 will be available in desktop, browser-based and Windows Mobile-based versions.
Microsoft (
News -
Alert) Office Communications Server 2007 uses the
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standards-based protocol to enable presence-based VoIP call management, as well as VoIP communication. Unfortunately, it appears as though this solution is strictly targeting the enterprise and completely ignoring the consumer market. Although it does support SIP, it will not support all SIP based VoIP networks, but instead only connect to Microsoft's proprietary (and commercial) Office Communications Server 2007 platform.
Sure, has partnered with public instant messaging networks such as AOL and Yahoo! to offer IM connectivity, but what if I want to have my employees use my own SIP registrar server or SIP-based IP-PBX in combination with just the Office Communicator 2007 client? Unfortunately, you can't. Stupid does it again… When will they understand that, with so many open-source solutions out there, you can't get away with this proprietary stuff? Proprietary solutions are
so 1990s.
Although the Office Communicator 2007 client
can connect to an IP-PBX, it has to
first go through Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 as an intermediary. I should point out that Microsoft's smartphones (Windows Mobile 5.0) have still been fairly slow to take off as compared to Treo and others, which are often used for business applications such as email access.
If Microsoft wanted to give its smartphones a shot in the arm, the company should have included support in Office Communicator 2007 client for
any SIP-based IP-PBX without the need for the Server 2007 platform. Sure, it's nice to have all the tight integration and ease of management, but hasn't Microsoft realized that most organizations are not 100 percent Microsoft shops? What if I want to use Microsoft's client with the popular Asterisk IP-PBX and without the commercial Office Communications Server 2007 software? Can't do it.
But if you
are a 100 percent
Microsoft shop—or at least your communications servers are—then here’s what you get with today's announcement.
1. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 unified messaging will make it possible to view voicemail from traditional PBXs and IP-PBXs in an Outlook inbox. Microsoft demonstrated an application where a user late for a meeting that is scheduled in an Outlook calendar can phone the Exchange server and tell the system to notify other participants that he or she is running late. The system, using voice recognition to interpret the message generated an e-mail notification.
2. TTS (text-to-speech), which will enable users to have e-mail read to them by telephone. Of course, this is nothing new to the Asterisk community, which can even have the weather read to you.
3. Microsoft Office RoundTable, an audio-video collaboration device with a unique 360-degree camera. When combined with Office Communications Server 2007, according to Microsoft, “RoundTable delivers an immersive conferencing experience that extends the meeting environment across multiple locations. Meeting participants on site and in remote locations gain a panoramic view of everyone in the conference room as well as close-up views of individual participants as they take turns speaking.”
Microsoft launched joint ventures with
Motorola Inc. and Germany's
Siemens AG.
The company will supply its Office Communications Server 2007 for use in
Motorola HC700 series mobile computing devices and the new sexy
Motorola Q smart phone. Also,
Siemens HiPath 8000 softswitch real-time telephony will be integrated with
Microsoft Exchange Server and
Microsoft Office Live Communications Server.
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is scheduled to be released in late 2006 or early 2007. Microsoft Speech Server 2007 will be available in late 2006. Communications Server 2007, Communicator 2007, Communicator phone experience, Live Meeting, RoundTable and the IP-enabled business desktop phones featuring Communicator phone experience will complete Microsoft’s unified communications solutions and are scheduled to be available in the second quarter of 2007.
Editorial note: For related news, please see the following articles. -----
