More on Unified Communication platform

Today we had a very good session with Danie Odendaal Microsoft solution specialist-portals & Collaboration for Middle East and Africa. He was presenting us the vision of Microsoft in terms of Unified Communication platform. He gave us a demo in which he dialed to MS exchange and listened voice mails, calendar entries and contacts. It is very good to see that now Microsoft speech technology is so much improved, we were able to give our commands easily without having accent problem. Also Ms is supporting number of languages but Arabic is not yet supported and it will be available in the second quarter of 2007. We got to know that office communication server (OCS) will be available in two versions, standard and enterprise. Standard will be the same as live communication server 2005 with some major enhancement. OCS enterprise will include MS live meeting bundled for live meeting and video conferencing. We also saw couple of IP phone models created by Microsoft partners. One of which has OCS client built in (not remember exact models) and one is connected to PC by USB. OCS client model can show you all the details such as dialed calls, missed calls, OCS users list with their status, conferencing facility and many other feature of OCS. USB phone don’t have any interface, it will connect with OCS client installed on PC and one can control it from there. If PC is off your calls will redirected to the exchange voice mail. We will be getting more information from Microsoft on unified communication.