Office Communication Server, Exchange and Office Communicator put voice on a level playing field in Microsoft nets.

In our initial evaluation of the first public beta code for Microsoft's Office Communication Server 2007, we measured it against what we know to be standard in the standards-based Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) IP PBX world.

But here we see what comes to life if you run this new code in an all Microsoft world. When it's deployed with Window Server 2003, Active Directory (running in native mode with DNS), Exchange Server 2007, SQL Server 2000, IIS 6.0 and Certificate Server on the back end with Windows XP clients running Office Ultimate 2007 and a beta version of Office Communicator 2007, the final result is easy user access to e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging and conferencing capabilities from the same interface.

OCS 2007 includes a deployment wizard to help guide IT administrators through the installation process. The Enterprise Edition can be installed in a consolidated topology, all components on a single physical server (as we did in our evaluation), or an expanded topology, each component on separate physical server. The wizard was very effective in walking us through each step of the process and provided meaningful feedback on issues that arose. For example, one of the steps failed and indicated that ASP, which we had not preloaded, could not be verified and may need to be installed.

The integration with Active Directory allows IT to enable user access to OCS services rapidly. Within the user properties of Active Directory a new Communications tab is shown. This allows administrators to directly configure OCS while setting up a new user as well as centralizing management functions for existing users. Administrators can control IP-PSTN call settings, IM Federation and Archiving from the same interface.

When an Exchange 2007 server is in the mix, integrating voice and e-mail is possible. Administrators need only configure a unified messaging mailbox policy then enable users for unified messaging. We chose to enable users by manually configuring the extension and PIN for each voice mailbox, but both can be generated automatically.

The unified messaging mailbox policy defines greeting length, automatic e-mail messages, PIN settings and dial plans. The automatic e-mail messages are sent to the user for certain events, such as when their account is enabled for unified messaging or their PIN is reset. Additional text, such as a company disclaimer, can also be specified for voice mail and fax notification messages. We were able to set different policies for different users and then customize the messages to each. This automatic e-mail generation frees administrators from some basic notification tasks.