Watch what is coming in next one year.

Even if you are not visiting Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference currently running, make sure you watch the keynotes LIVE/Recorded to get glimpse of all the products coming in next one year.

Here are few of them :

• Windows Phone ‘Mango’
• Windows 8
• Windows Server 8
• System Center 2012
• …lots of other cool stuff.

Visit http://www.digitalwpc.com

* 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

* Cisco Unified Communications Release 8.0 announced

At its recent Cisco Collaboration Summit, Cisco announced the release of its Unified Communications 8.0 Product. Why it interests me ? I have been working on Unified Communication platforms of Microsoft & Cisco since last one year.

I started building a business application on Unified Communications platform which acted as a SIP endpoint. The versions on which i started where Microsoft OCS 2007 R1 & Cisco UC 6.0. My business application could easily integrate with OCS 2007 with help of UC client api sdk but there was no way to support such kind of applications on Cisco UC 6.0 as there was no client sdk available.

With Cisco UC 7.0, Cisco released a set of web services which help in creating such kind of application but still they are not true SIP end points. Hope to see better custom client support as part of 8.0 release.

 

As part of this release, Cisco has announced improvement in following areas :

1. Enabling business to business collaboration : Cisco Intercompany Media Engine allows seamless integration of UC infrastructures of two organization. Something similar to this on Microsoft platform is federation but i have not heard of scenario about B2B on MS platform. This will make lot of sense in case of partners, suppliers and sub entities.
2. Choice of clients : IP phone, Soft clients and mobile clients. Third party clients like IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Communicator also supported. OCS 2007 already supports these types of clients.
3. Choice of Deployment models : on-premises, hosted & hybrid. OCS too supports these.

The adoption of UC platform is continuously with enterprises because of dollar saving they bring to communication cost. But the value these platforms can deliver by integrating them into Line of Business applications is yet to be realized.

* OCS 2007 R2 Trial : Urgent Fix

Microsoft has just released the following Knowledge Base articles (KB972041, KB972042) to address the incorrect calculations of license expiration dates for Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2 and Office Communicator (OC) 2007 R2 Evaluation Edition. The current expiration dates were calculated based on build time, causing the OCS 2007 R2 and OC 2007 R2 Evaluation Edition to expire after June 13, 2009. By applying this fix, the expiration date will be correctly based on installation date of the server.
Office Communications Server 2007 R2
Office Communications 2007 R2

* Unified Communications – Getting Started

Microsoft’s Unified Communications platform integrates traditional communication channels like phone and fax with newer channels like emails, audio and video conferencing. It also brings advanced features like presence information and alerts.

This brings lot of productivity in communication and collaboration between teams and also helps in implementing advanced Business Process Communication.

If you are new to UC platform and want to integrate UC capabilities into your LOB apps.. you can start here.

• SIP Tutorial
• Unified Communications - Overview
• Developing on Unified Communications Platform
• OCS 2007 - Features and Capabilities
• What's new in OCS 2007 R2

* What’s new in Office Communications Server OCS 2007 R2

OCS 2007 R2 will be ready to purchase starting from Feb 2009.

Some of the important enhancements this release is bringing are:

· Dial-in audio conferencing: An on-premise solution and a low cost alternative to traditional PBX solution.

· OCS Web Client: will support desktop sharing and audio communication.

· Persistent group chat: Topic based chat rooms with support for archiving, search and alerts for new messages.

· Development: More APIs and Visual Studio extensions (project templates) to get developers started quickly on building communication into their applications.

* Unified Communication : Development Platform

Various products participating in Unified Communication strategy publish software development kits / APIs to develop applications for UC platform.

Here is the list of APIs available.

o Exchange Server 2007 SP1 API

o Extending and customizing Exchange Server

o Office Communications Server API

Create applications that customize and extend OCS 2007. E.g. archiving, modification of message content body, message logging, filtering & blocking messages based on rules.

o Office Communications Server Application API

Provides Microsoft SIP Processing Language (MSPL) for custom SIP message filtering and routing.

o Office Communications Server Management API

Develop WMI extension for OCS 2007

o Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server API

Develop voice response applications.

o Office Communicator Automation API

Extend and customize office communicator or access instance of Office Communicator from custom windows applications.

o Office Live Meeting Service API

Developing Web and Windows based client for Office Live Meeting.

o Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA)

Server or middle tier applications supporting real-time communication.

o Unified Communications Client API (UCCA)

Real-time communication clients similar to Office Communicator.

o Unified Communications AJAX API

Used to develop web based clients by providing programmatic interface to Communicator Web Access functionality.

* Unified Communications : An Overview

· Unifies & integrates telephony based traditional communication channels like phones, fax etc with newer computing based channels like emails, A/V conferencing, Instant Messaging, VoIP telephone service etc.

· Improves communication and collaboration.

· Products participating in UC are :

• Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007
• § Manages real-time synchronous communication which includes instant messaging, VoIP, audio and video conferencing.
• Microsoft Office Communicator 2007
• Client for real-time communication which works with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
• Manages all asynchronous communication which includes email, voice mail, faxes and calendars. Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 is the client for Exchange Server 2007.
• Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server
• IVR platform with built-in support for speech recognition and speech synthesis.
• Supports .NET programming languages and voice Web standards like VoiceXML and SALT.
• Hosted Services for Exchange, Messaging & Live Meeting.

· Extensible platform for customizing existing or building new clients.

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