Microsoft Office Communications Server 14 Revealed

Microsoft has unveiled Office Communication Server 14. If your customers are looking for that all-in-one VOIP, instant message, e-mail and unified communication server program, Microsoft wants to talk to you. Microsoft showed off OCS 14 this week at VoiceCon in Orlando. Here’s some perspective.

Of course, we’ve got to give a tip of the hat to Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet’s All Things Microsoft. She scooped the story with some of the interesting details.

The first one is that — like you may have noticed — , “Microsoft Office Communication Server 14” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. To give the product a little zip and pop, they’ve truncated the name to “Communications Server 2010” which this blogger thinks is just fine. CS 2010 is designed to integrate with SharePoint Sever 2010 and Exchange Server 2010, and that can only mean good things. Besides, the software is supposed to truly be your one-stop-shop-portal for all things communication.

Microsoft seems set to deliver CS 2010 before the year is out, but there’s no word on a public beta and other details. It was, however, noted that a private test will be available for Technology Adoptions partners in Q2 codenamed “Metro” and has allegedly started just a few days ago.

One of the goals of CS 2010 is to provide a social-networking composition in both use and style of software. There’s location detection, activity feeds, and “integrated skill-search” functionality. But as of now, the only concrete details Microsoft is spilling their guts about are the voice-features of the software.

Microsoft officials predict Unified Communications will proliferate and become the de-facto standard for how businesses communicate in the 3 couple years. This blogger thinks it may even be less than that — though many VARs and MSPs are still evaluating their UC strategies.

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