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.

The ability to provide some sort of failover redundancy or site resiliency has been seen as an Achilles heel of Microsoft Office Communications Server. Microsoft has made some enhancements though in R2 and produced a white paper describing how to accomplish site resiliency with Microsoft OCS 2007 R2.

Here is the description Microsoft provides for the white paper:

This white paper describes a site resiliency solution for Office Communications Server 2007 R2. The solution includes an Enterprise pool that spans two geographically separate sites. The solution provides a failover mechanism between the two sites to ensure that Office Communications Server functionality such as instant messaging, presence, and conferencing remains available even if one of the sites becomes unavailable.

This white paper is divided into three main sections:

To make things even easier to monitor and manage, Microsoft has developed a Forefront Security for Office Communications Server Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007. Microsoft provides the following overview of the capabilities of this tool:

The Microsoft Forefront Security for Office Communications Server Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 provides real-time insight into the health and performance of key Forefront Security for Office Communications Server (Version 10) components and services. The Microsoft Forefront Security for Office Communications Server Management Pack alerts the administrator to critical events affecting the security of their OCS environment. Proactive management of the Microsoft Forefront Security for Office Communications Server environment is facilitated through management pack activity reports on IM scan performance.

Feature Bullet Summary

• Monitoring of current license state
• Monitoring of Antimalware Engine health and update activity
• Monitoring of IM Scan Job availability
• Monitoring health of required Forefront Security for OCS services
• Reports on key Forefront for OCS performance counters

Sprint SIP trunking customers will be able to leverage Sprint’s Global MPLS network and utilize a single IP network connection to facilitate voice, date, and video conferencing connections.

SIP trunking and VoIP enable customers to save significantly over traditional local and long distance expenses, and it is also a key component of unified communications.

Maybe. I should say that Presence can do all of that…when used properly. However, users who simply set their status as Away when they are really sitting at their desk working because they don’t want to be bothered undermine the value of Presence. Similarly, users who have high idle times and show as Available when, in fact, they haven’t been sitting at their computer for the past hour also reduce the utility of the Presence information and in effect render it useless.

To be fair, as the concept of Presence and status have evolved from consumer instant messaging clients, the level of granularity for assigning status as well as the ability to control who sees what haven’t been there. In the early days of instant messaging services like ICQ status basically amounted to Available, Away, and Offline and pretty much anybody could see that.

Unified communications solutions like Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS 2007 R2) have greatly expanded the concept of Presence though. Presence can tell if you are in a meeting or on a phone call. Presence can provide details about your status instead of just black and white information like online or offline. OCS 2007 R2 also allows users to determine how much information to share with contacts. One contact may only be able to see if you are available or not, while your manager or project team can also see details about what you are doing and when you’ll be available.

With access to the inner-workings of OCS, it is possible to determine whether a user is *really* Away, or if they are actively using their computer and just hiding behind the Away status. As this blog entry points out though, it is not an elegant solution. Uncovering the real Presence state is not something you want to provide every user, but for an Administrator this information may be valuable in determining how users are employing Presence and developing policies and user awareness programs to try and address any issues.  

Advances in Presence like the granular availability information found in OCS 2007 R2 make it much more useful…when used properly. It is important that users are educated about the proper use of Presence and that they are encourage not to abuse the Presence states. Without accurate Presence information many of the benefits and efficiencies of unified communications will not be realized.

• Schedule a new Live Meeting conference or conference call
• View and modify details of an existing conference.
• List schedules of all existing user of a Microsoft Office conference.
• Delete an existing conference.
• Send an e-mail invitation to conference participants using a configured SMTP mail server.
• Join an existing conference.

The Web Scheduler is an ASP.Net application and must be installed on the same Internet Information Services (IIS) server that the OCS 2007 R2 Web Components are running on.

Web Scheduler requires OCS 2007 R2. The ability to send email meeting invites requires an SMTP server- ostensibly Microsoft Exchange Server, but others will due.

SIP trunking offers savings by eliminating some hardware components and more importantly by cutting costs and increasing efficiency. Adam Boone, vice president of marketing at Sipera Systems said “The economic crisis has underscored for us that any technology that enables greater enterprise process efficiencies actually is relatively recession proof” in a recent interview.

The rest of the interview with Boone is interesting and worth a read. SIP trunking is a step in the evolution from traditional voice to a completely software-based, IP-voice implementation. Be sure to keep security on your to-do list though. Part of the reason that Sipera Systems is gung ho on SIP trunking is that they offer appliances and services that let customers deploy it securely and extend it to remote and branch workers. Take a look at what they have to offer and how it can enhance your SiP trunking VoIP infrastructure.

Thankfully, amid a slew of other recent updates, Microsoft also corrected this glaring error in call management. Mike Stacy, a Director with Evangelyze Communications, illustrates the difference with before and after screen shots in his blog entry on this subject. Stacy also points out some additional steps necessary to ensure the updates work with Office Communicator, and to configure Office Communications Server 2007 to also display caller information on outbound calls.

I wanted Office Communicator Mobile and the ability to view Presence status of my contacts. I wanted native Office application compatibility (ability to view and work with Word and Excel files). I wanted my email to look and feel like the Outlook I am used to on my computer. So, I eventually reclaimed my AT&T Tilt and returned the iPhone to my wife.

That is not to say that there is not room for improvement. Significant improvement. So, it is with great anticipation that I have been looking forward to the next release- Windows Mobile 6.5. As you can imagine then, I was disappointed to read Joe Schurman’s thoughts on what he saw in Windows Mobile 6.5 while attending the 2009 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans.

Oh well. It may fall short of what it could be, but it will still be better than what it is now. I guess baby steps are better than no steps at all.

Check out this video overview of SmartSIP to learn why this product is so revolutionary, then visit the Evangelyze Communications site to get more details and figure out how to use SmartSIP to change communications in your organization.