Microsoft’s Office Communications Server Goes Beta
Posted on March 15, 2007 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under VoIP News
In a keynote webcast address at VoiceCon Spring 2007 in Orlando, the president of Microsoft Corp.’s Business Division, Jeff Raikes, announced the distribution of a public beta-test version of Office Communications Server 2007 and the client software Office Communicator 2007 later in March. An optimistic Raikes also predicted that in three years time 100 million users will be making VoIP phone calls from Microsoft® Office applications, doubling the number of business VoIP users today.
The Microsoft OCS ’07 is a unified communications server that offers enhanced VoIP, audio/video conferencing, instant messaging (IM), and presence. The client software allows users to communicate through software and a headset, eliminating the need for IP desk phones that are estimated to be 40-45% of the cost in a VoIP deployment. According to Raikes, moving from a hardware to a software based system will cut the cost of VoIP business solutions by half.
And apparently it works! In an independent evaluation of a pre release version of OCS done by Psytechnics, Microsoft’s softphone VoIP solution was found to be superior in speech quality when compared to Cisco’s 7961 IP phone, a fairly standard industry model.
OCS ’07 is designed to easily integrate with other legacy IP PBX’s. The so called Innovative Communications Alliance puts Nortel and Microsoft in a strategic partnership integrating OCS ’07 with Nortel’s PBX and conferencing products. Of course, OCS also can act as it’s own PBX.
One company that is betting heavily on Microsoft’s ability to produce, is oil company Royal Dutch Shell. Shell currently uses Nortel’s CS1000 IP PBX to host IP phones around the world. This year they will begin testing on MS OCS 07, and plan a global VoIP rollout in 2008.
The Office Communications Servers will be deployed in three data centers in the U.S., Netherlands, and Malaysia, and will host about 40,000 IP hard and soft phones. The plan is to slowly migrate off of hundreds of different PBX systems onto one centralized OCS based infrastructure. If all goes well, the hardphones will be phased out, and Nortel equipment will be used as a gateway to bridge legacy circuit switching and VoIP telephony.
Microsoft is offering the public beta version to customers and partners. You can register to receive a copy on the Microsoft website.
voip, ocs, microsoft ocs, IP telephony, telecommunication, office communications server, ocs 07
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