Microsoft's Unified Communications Play

Unified communications integrates voice, e-mail, IM and presence. It aims to improve productivity by providing one platform that lets employees communicate using the most appropriate medium.

Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 is the company's flagship UC offering. A revamped version of Live Communication Server 2005, the heart of the product is its IM capabilities. Many employees use public IM clients available from AOL, Yahoo and others. This can present regulatory and compliance problems for enterprises, which makes an in-house system more attractive. OCS sweetens the deal with tight integration of Exchange and Outlook, which extends the presence feature of IM to other mediums.

It also adds features such as audio, video and Web conferencing that weren't available in the software's previous incarnation. Users can initiate conferences from their desktop and include employees in the same building or across the country.

Microsoft has also integrated with Cisco, Avaya and Nortel and others to provide a voice mail and call routing system right from your Windows desktop, essentially turning your PC into a VoIP soft-phone.OCS 2007 competes directly with Lotus Sametime 7.5, which offers almost an identical feature set (see chart).

Other options include JabberNow, Jive OpenFire, and Reuters Messaging. While certainly not as feature rich, they may do the job, and all are far less expensive than OCS, especially if you are looking for just an IM product.

Several vendors can also help you cobble together your own UC environment by building off an existing VoIP infrastructure. They include Cisco's Unified Presence Server and Unified Personal Communicator, Avaya's one-X software, and Siemens' OpenScape. These systems may require more integration work than Microsoft's package, which takes full advantage of Office's dominance in the workplace.

Message For You
Microsoft's OSC is built around the Communicator 2007 IM client. And the heart of the client is presence: your colleagues and their status are displayed in an IM contact list, and from there you can send them e-mail, dial them with a click of a button, initiate a chat session or start a web conference in Live Meeting or a voice or video conference with team members.Users can exercise some control over presence management, such as letting others know they are in a meeting or otherwise unavailable. Users can also indicate a preferred method of contact, such as a voice call or an e-mail. Presence information can also extend to mobile phones that run Windows Communication Mobile.

Microsoft offers privacy settings so that users don't have to broadcast information such as their Outlook schedules or calendars in the presence function.

If companies need to record and log IM conversations, an Archiving server uses SQL to store and search previous chats. This is an enterprise-class feature for companies that are required to record communications. Companies that don't have to store all conversations should be judicious in how much data they save.

The Archiving server also lets users view and search previous chats in Outlook 2007, much like GMail's logged chat feature. It will store previous conversations from the Communicator client in a folder in your users' inboxes for easy searching. However, you need Outlook 2007 to take advantage of this feature.

Communicator encrypts all IM traffic among OCS users. IMs with users on public IM clients are not encrypted, which is something to consider if you have security concerns. OCS does not disable the use of other IM clients. If you want to limit user access to other instant messaging systems, you will need a third party solution such as proxy.The IM system lacks persistent group chat, in which group chat sessions are preserved in a chat room so that users can refer back to old conversations. To address this hole, Microsoft purchased MindAlign from Parlano to provide this feature. It should be integrated into a future version of OCS, perhaps a year from now.

Don't Forget VoIP
Voice is a critical component of a unified communications platform. OCS can link to your VoIP PBX and enable employee PCs to act as VoIP soft phone. Users will require either a USB headset or the speakers and microphone built into the computer. Microsoft is partnering with PBX providers including Alcatel, Avaya, Cisco, Ericson, Mytel, NEC, Nortel and Siemens, to make sure the Communicator client can make and receive calls over your existing VoIP system.

You have three VoIP options with OCS. First, the OCS Mediation Server and a PSTN gateway allow you to make outbound calls, requiring a voice PRI or a direct SIP connection to your PBX. Second, you can connect your PBX and handsets to the Mediation Server. Third, you can make workstations into SIP clients and make calls through Mediation Server to your VoIP PBX.

The Mediation Server we tested worked very well with a PSTN. Inbound and outbound calls had excellent clarity. We also tested Communicator as a soft phone and hooked it up to our Cisco VoIP PBX through Mediation server, using SIP. This required a good deal of trial and error; you'll need detailed knowledge of your VoIP PBX and SIP to make it work. However, once we were able to get Communicator to connect, we were able to place calls much as we would from our Cisco desk phones.

Note that advanced features such as the ability to transcribe voicemail to text-based e-mail require Exchange 2007.0