Microsoft Office Communications Server

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, OCS 2007, is an enterprise real-time communications server, providing the infrastructure to allow instant messaging, presence, audio-video conferencing and web conferencing functionality.

Client Software

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 (MOC07) and LiveMeeting console are the client side applications paired for use with OCS 2007. Microsoft Office Communicator leverages the OCS server to find, monitor, and communicate (instant messages, presence, telephony) with other users within an organization.

Features

One basic use of Office Communications Server is instant messaging and presence within a single organization. This includes support for rich presence information, file transfer, instant messaging as well as voice and video communication. (These latter features are often not possible even within a single organisation using public IM clients, due to the effects of negotiating the corporate firewall and Network Address Translation). If setup properly according to Microsoft's documentation there are no problems using voice and video inside and outside the corporate network.

OCS 2007 also supports remote users, both corporate users on the internet (e.g. home workers) as well as users in partner companies. OCS 2007 supports "federation" - enabling interoperability with other corporate IM networks. Federation can be configured either manually (where each partner manually configures the relevant edge servers in the other org) or based on use of the appropriate SRV records in the DNS.

Microsoft Office Communications Server uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for signaling along with the SIMPLE extensions to SIP for IM and presence. Media is transferred using RTP/SRTP. The Live Meeting client uses PSOM to download meeting content. The Communicator client also uses HTTPS to connect with the web components server to download address books, expand distribution lists, etc. By default, Office Communications Server encrypts all signaling and media traffic using SIP over TLS and SRTP. There is one exception to this - traffic between the Mediation Server and a basic media gateway is carried as SIP over TCP and RTP.

Compliance

OCS 2007 also has the capability to log and archive all instant message traffic passing through the server and to create Call Detail Records for conferences and voice. These features provide a measure of compliance, increasingly a legal requirement for many organizations, however the Archiving server is not an overall end-to-end compliance solution. Archiving requires you to install the Archiving Server and to configure front end servers accordingly.

Public IM Connectivity (PIC)

OCS 2007 also enables organizations to interoperate with the three public IM providers: AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. PIC was first introduced with Service Pack 1 for Live Communications Server 2005, PIC is licensed separately.

Previous Versions

* 2007 - Office Communications Server 2007
* 2006 - Live Communications Server 2005 with SP1
* 2005 - Live Communications Server 2005, codenamed Vienna
* 2003 - Live Communications Server 2003

History

When Microsoft Office Live Communications Server was originally launched on 29 December 2003, it replaced the Exchange Instant Messenger Service that had been included in Exchange 2000, but which was removed from the Exchange 2003 feature set. Holders of Exchange 2000 licenses which include Software Assurance are entitled to receive Live Communications Server as an upgrade, along with Exchange 2003; however, Live Communications Server Client Access Licenses must be purchased as normal for new users.

Competition

Competitors to OCS include IBM's Lotus Sametime, Jabber XCP (from Jabber, Inc., not to be confused with the open-source IM project Jabber, also an IETF open standard named XMPP), Cisco's Unified Presence Server and Unified Personal Communicator, Avaya's one-X software and Siemens' OpenScape, Openfire, Tigase and ejabberd.

In the Instant Messaging space, the free public instant messaging networks (Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL) are widely used and represent a degree of competition. There have been attempts by other vendors at providing solutions such as Yahoo!'s Enterprise Instant Messenger; however these attempts have been largely unsuccessful. An ICQ corporate client and server option once existed, but it is no longer supported or developed.

Important to note that products such as Cisco Unified Presence Server (Version 6.0.2+) support federation with Microsoft OCS 2007 to provide presence of Cisco IP Phone's and remote call control of the IP Phone from the Microsoft Office Communicator client.

ee also

* Microsoft Office
* Windows Server System
* Microsoft Office Communicator (2007)
* Nortel Communication Server 2100
* LG-Nortel IP Phone 8540
* Instant Messaging
* Comparison of office suites
* List of Microsoft - Nortel (ICA) Products

External links

* [http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/communicationsserver/default.aspx Microsoft Office Communications Server (official site)]
* [http://www.microsoft.com/office/livecomm/prodinfo/compare.mspx LCS feature comparison]
* [http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905499.aspx LCS Developer Portal]
* [http://imwire.eventure.biz/imwire/category/4.aspx LCS Developer articles]
* [http://www.lcs-guides.com LCS Support website and forum, by Meni Milstein - LCS MVP]
* [http://blogs.microsoft.fr/franckha/archive/2005/08/19/8176.aspx Customer Case Study]
* [http://www.nortel.com/services/collateral/nn123226.pdf Factors to consider when deploying Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007]
* [http://www.innovativecommunicationsalliance.com/ Innovative Communications Alliance (Nortel – Microsoft)]
* [http://www.Ocspedia.com/ An Excellent site to provide OCS info - www.OCSpedia.com]