Done right, a unified communications system integrating voice, e-mail, conferencing, IM, and presence improves productivity by providing a single platform over which workers communicate using the most appropriate medium. We put Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft's flagship unified communications offering, to the test and found it does UC right, if not simply.

The heart of OCS 2007, a revamped version of Live Communications Server 2005, is its IM capabilities. Face it: Your employees are using IM clients from AOL and others, regardless of the compliance nightmares inherent with these public networks. In-house IM can provide many benefits, and OCS 2007 sweetens the deal with tight integration of Exchange and Outlook, which extends IM's presence capabilities to other media. It also adds features, such as audio, video, and Web conferencing, that weren't available in the software's previous incarnation. Users can initiate conferences from their desktops and include employees in the same building--or across the country.

OCS 2007's closest rival is IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5, which offers an almost identical feature set, but JabberNow, Jive OpenFire, and Reuters Messaging also are angling for enterprise IM business. While certainly not as feature rich as OCS, they may do the job for far less money. Several vendors can also help you cobble together a UC environment by building off an existing voice-over-IP infrastructure; products include Cisco's Unified Presence Server and Unified Personal Communicator, Avaya's one-X software, and Siemens' OpenScape. These systems will require more integration than Microsoft's package, which takes full advantage of Office's dominance in the workplace.

MESSAGE FOR YOU
OCS is built around Microsoft's Communicator 2007 IM client. At the heart of this client is presence: Users' status information is displayed in an IM contact list, from which you can send e-mail, dial with a click of a button, initiate a chat session, or start a Web conference in Live Meeting or a voice or videoconference. Basic presence management is available and can extend to smartphones that run Windows Mobile; Microsoft offers privacy settings so users can choose which information to display.

For companies that log IM conversations, an archiving server uses SQL to store chats. This is a key feature for those required to record all communications, but others should be judicious in how much data they save. The archiving server also lets users view and search previous chats in Outlook 2007.

Communicator encrypts IM traffic among OCS users, but sessions with users on public IM clients are not encrypted, and OCS doesn't disable use of other IM clients. If you want to prevent users from accessing other IM systems, you'll need a third-party proxy.

Voice is a critical component of a UC platform. OCS can link to your VoIP PBX and enable employee PCs to act as VoIP soft phones. Microsoft also is partnering with PBX providers, including Alcatel, Avaya, Cisco, Ericsson, Mytel, NEC, Nortel, and Siemens, to ensure that the Communicator client can make and receive calls over most VoIP systems. Note that advanced features, such as the ability to transcribe voice mail to text-based e-mail, require Exchange 2007.

For meetings, OCS lets employees quickly set up audio, video, and Web conferences. By default, users can make direct PC-to-PC calls, but to host large groups you'll need to install the Web conference server, a full-featured LiveMeeting server that lets the client log in through LiveMeeting. Users can save Web conferences for later use, handy for training or employee orientation.