From Unified Messaging to Unified Communications

I commented that Microsoft recently moved the Exchange development team from the Server and Tools Division into the business organization responsible for Office and LCS and asked Zig whether the move might foreshadow a future merging of Exchange and LCS into one product. He replied, "They will remain distinct products, but from an evolution standpoint, there's a reason why we have both products under a single business unit at Microsoft. We deeply believe that the two experiences have a lot of complementary synergies, particularly with respect to rules, identity, security, management, IT infrastructure, even the user experience and reachability."

UC Components
Zig explained what you need to get started with UM, "The application components are email, voicemail, IM, video and audio conferencing, Web conferencing, and call management (the call control you typically have in a PBX). First, upgrade email [to Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007] and deploy LCS in parallel. Then get ready for Office Communications Server [OCS, which supersedes LCS]. If you upgrade Exchange and deploy LCS right away, Office 2007 lets you light up your AD with presence capability. You won't get those things if you don't deploy both at the same time."

I asked Zig to expand on OCS. "OCS is committed to ship in the end of the second quarter of 2007. It's in beta now. OCS offers some interesting possibilities even from a SKU perspective. For example, you get cell phone functionality today as part of LCS. But OCS will offer a separate SKU for that and will give you call management. Companies have a lot of Skype users, and people will be able to do secure VoIP calls and integrate with the corporate dialing plan, running off the same system they're running their IM platform on. In addition, you can run SIP-based phone endpoints off it. You get that experience over a non-VPN environment. Just as when you're traveling and have access to Outlook using HTTPS-based login, you get the same experience with Communicator—not just for IM, but for voice and video."

Justifying UC
Surveyed readers were split on the value of deploying UC, to which Zig replied, "In some ways, email wasn't cost justified in the early 90s, but it crept into the way people work. An interesting fact: The adoption rate of LCS corporate-grade IM today is similar to what we saw from 1997 to 2000 when corporations started standardizing on an email platform. Companies are using IM as a productivity tool that also provides IM archiving capabilities so you can meet compliance requirements, deal with HR, have encrypted traffic, and do federation."

Because 57 percent of readers surveyed requested articles on UC, we'll be writing about this technology in the near future. Let me know what you'd like to learn about UC.