Communications Server

This is the first Microsoft product to combine enterprise-ready IM (instant messaging), presence awareness, conferencing, and VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol) telephony, in a fully integrated and unified communications solution. Office Communications Server™ provides richer "presence awareness" capabilities, enhanced support for group IM, and improved deployment and management capabilities, than its predecessor, Microsoft Office Live Communications Server™.

Communications Server is available in two editions:

• Standard Edition:

  Hosts all server components, as well as the database for storing user and conference information, on a single computer. Standard Edition provides full functionality for small organizations at significant cost savings.

• Enterprise Edition:

  Separates server functionality from data storage to achieve higher capacity and availability. An Enterprise Edition pool typically consists of two or more Front End Servers, which are fronted by a hardware load balancer and connected to a Back-End Database. (It is also possible to deploy a single Front End Server without a load balancer). Optionally, certain conferencing components can be deployed on separate computers for higher capacity and availability. Enterprise Edition is appropriate for medium and large organizations.

Both editions support the full suite of IM, presence awareness, conferencing, and VoIP features.

New Features:

• On-Premise Web Conferencing

  Sawtel Hosted Office Communications Server™ introduces the capability for enterprise users, both inside and outside of the firewall, to create and join real-time Web conferences. These on-premise conferences, or meetings, can be scheduled or unscheduled, and they can include IM, audio, video, application sharing, slide presentations, and other forms of data collaboration. Enterprise users can invite external users, who do not have an Active Directory Domain Services account to participate. Users employed by federated partners with a secure and authenticated identity can also join conferences and, if invited to do so, can act as presenters. This unified, server-based conferencing solution provides an alternative to hosted Web conferencing for organizations that require a more secure and controlled collaboration experience.

• Group IM

  Refers to an IM conversation among three or more parties. You can create a group IM session in the following ways:

  • Invite additional parties to a two-person IM conversation
  • Send an instant message to multiple parties
  • Send an instant message to a Microsoft Exchange Server™ distribution list

  Microsoft Exchange™ distribution lists can be saved as contacts. Distribution groups of up to 1000 users can be defined and an IM session can include up to 100 members.

• Audio and Video

  Users can specify multi-party A/V when scheduling a conference or can add audio or video to an existing IM conversation or conference call. Audio/Video Conferencing can support up to 250 participants within a single session. Audio and video conferencing can also be extended to external users.

• Enterprise Voice

  This is Microsoft's™ software-powered VoIP solution. Together with IM, conferencing, audio/video features, and full integration with Outlook and Exchange Unified Messaging, Enterprise Voice enables Communications Server users to choose the most appropriate way to communicate with colleagues throughout the enterprise. From their PCs, users can place a call by clicking on an Outlook, or Communicator contact. Users receive calls, simultaneously, on all their registered user endpoints. How they choose to answer the call is up to them. This feature also enables users to receive calls on their mobile phones or other mobile devices.

• Microsoft RoundTable™

  Sawtel Hosted Office Communications Server™ supports the Microsoft RoundTable™ communications and archival system, Microsoft’s new 360-degree surround audio/video conference-room device, which turns an online meeting into a true face-to-face experience. Attending a video conference by using RoundTable is much the same as attending a meeting in person. The audio and video of your entire conference room is delivered to a remote meeting location for your co-workers to interact in real time.

• Enhanced Presence

  Sawtel Hosted Office Communications Server™ provides the infrastructure to enable client applications to publish and subscribe to extended, or enhanced, presence information. The enhanced presence infrastructure includes categories and containers. Categories are individual pieces of presence information, such as status, location, or calendar state. Containers are logical buckets into which clients publish instances of various categories of presence information. When any change occurs, clients can publish an individual category, instead of an entire presence document, as is the case with Live Communications Server.

• Federation Enhancements

  Sawtel Hosted Office Communications Server™ supports all the federation and remote user scenarios that are currently enabled by Live Communications Server. In addition, Sawtel Hosted Office Communications Server™ introduces the following enhancements to existing federation support:

  • Federated Conferencing
  • Support for partners with multiple domain names
  • Improved monitoring and throttling capabilities for federated connections
• Simplified deployment and management capabilites
• Client Applications

  These are the tools with which end users access and use the IM, presence, and conferencing features that are made possible by Office Communications Server. Without the clients, the features exist as mere potential. Without the server, the clients have nothing to do.

Office Communications Server supports the following client applications:

• Microsoft Office Communicator™

  Office Communicator is the recommended Unified Communications client for Office Communications Server™. Office Communicator™ exposes to end users the presence, IM, and multimodal conferencing features that are supported by Office Communications Server™, including expanded presence information and user control over who sees it, group IM based on Exchange Distribution Lists, and the addition of audio and video to IM conversations.

• Microsoft Office Communicator Phone Edition™

  Microsoft has developed the Microsoft Office Communicator Phone Edition™ softphone application, for organizations or users who are more comfortable making calls from a "phone-like" device than from the Office Communicator™ software client. Like Office Communicator™, the Office Communicator Phone Edition™ allows you to place a call either by using a numeric touchpad, or by clicking one of your contacts. The Office Communicator Phone Edition™ also supports enhanced presence, SIP signaling, and a user experience similar to that of Office Communicator™, all in a desktop telephone. The Office Communicator Phone Edition™ can be used to connect from home, or in the office.

• Microsoft Office Live Meeting™ client

  The Office Live Meeting™ client is the data collaboration and audio/video client for both Office Communications Server™ and the hosted Microsoft Live Meeting™ service, providing a unified collaboration experience across both server-based and service-based conferencing products.

• Microsoft Outlook Add-in™

  The Microsoft Outlook Add-in™ is the conference scheduling client for Office Communications Server™. It is compatible with Microsoft Office Outlook™.