I love how the spin doctors at MS are trying to paint a picture of this inexpensive bleeding edge telephony solution. For crying out loud this article even touts being able to dial someone from a Microsoft application, I hate to break it to you but this has been around for quite some time with other vendors products. I'm still amazed that people think this is such a revolutionary develpment in the market place. MS finally wised up and realized they could bully themselves into this market by allowing collaborative serverices to interoperate across their product lines. What they are trying to do is good as far as competition goes and I applaud them for that, but if they really gave a shit they would allow other vendors access to sip precense state within LCS (obviously this won't happen). This is another MS proprietary solution that really doesn't allow for much if any interoperation with other vendors products with the exception of the aforementioned phones. The IM functionality is great and it would have been nice if they really followed the SIP draft standards (LOL). At the end of the day MS will be able to convince many SMBs to go with this solution, unfortunately based on what I've seen so far there are still scalability issues that need to be overcome, and more importantly reliablity issues. It'll be worth another look in 3-5 years....