Extend OCS UC with Exchange 2010 OWA

Microsoft is poised to revolutionize unified communications once all of the Wave 14 products hit the streets. We’re already realizing some of the benefits with the release of Exchange 2010. As this blog post notes, the combination of Exchange 2010 and OCS 2007 R2 enable unified communications features to be extended to the OWA (Outlook Web Access) experience.

Specifically, you get:

• Presence for internal and federated OCS contacts
• Ability to start and maintain chat sessions directly from OWA
• OCS contact list integration, including add/remove contacts and groups
• Ability to control your presence state from OWA

This is just the beginning, too. Once OCS 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Office 2010 are all in place everything will be more tightly integrated and UC functionality will permeate virtually every aspect of the Windows computing environment.