Live Communication

Overview

This is the first Microsoft product to combine enterprise-ready IM (instant messaging), presence, conferencing, and VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol) telephony in a fully-integrated unified communications solution. Office Communications Server provides richer presence capabilities, enhanced support for group IM, and improved deployment and management than its predecessor, Microsoft Office Live Communications Server. In addition to prior features such as federation and public IM connectivity, Office Communications Server now incorporates real-time conferencing hosted on servers inside your organization’s firewall and a full-featured, software-powered VoIP solution that can stand on its own, or integrate easily with an existing PBX infrastructure.

Like Sawtel Hosted Live Communications Server, Sawtel Hosted Office Communications Server is available in two editions, Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition:

• 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, conferencing, and VoIP features.

New Features:

• On-premise Web conferencing
• Group IM
• Audio and video
• Enterprise Voice
• Microsoft RoundTable™ communications and archival system
• Enhanced presence
• Federation enhancements
• Client applications
• Simplified deployment and management

Levels of access to presence information