* Microsoft Office Communications Server ‘14’ announced

Here are highlights :

• ‘Office Communications Server’ has been renamed to ‘Communications Server’. That’s on the same line as word ‘Office’ has been removed from SharePoint too.
• Expected to see final release at the end of 2010.

As it was announced at VoiceCon 2010, mostly telephone related features announced as of now.

New features from Inside OCS

Location Awareness Capabilities:

• Built into the next release of Communicator (Wave 14) and used by OCS on the server-side.
• Location information can be manually set by the user, or it can be auto-set on the corporate LAN.
• The location information can be sent on the SIP channel and used for 911 features.

Native E911 Support (in Microsoft Communications Server 14).

Tighter integration with SharePoint, Exchange, and Office.

SharePoint Integration:

• New Communicator “skill search” functionality built into the next release of Communicator that searches SharePoint profiles to find people with the skills you are looking for.
• Initiate audio and video communication directly from SharePoint search results.
• Phonetic based search in Communicator to locate associated SharePoint information.

Voicemail Features:

• Visual voicemail capabilities directly integrated into Communicator 14.
• Multi-language translation capabilities (with Exchange 2010 voicemail integration).
• Ability to jump to a specific point in voicemail.

Call Admission Control:

• The ability to use bandwidth information and policies to know if a video call can be initiated.

Branch Office Survivability:

• Several Microsoft Partners (i.e. AudioCodes, Dialogic, Ferrari electronic AG, HP, and NET) announced Branch Appliances that provide local telephony services in the event of a wide area network failure.

MCS ‘14’ website