With lots of useful features on the day of release, Office Communications Server still needs time to mature and prove itself
VoIP capabilities within Office Communications Server 2007 from Microsoft can offer significant business advantages for corporations, but it’s not all plug-and-play yet.
Global Crossing, which was a private beta user of the unified communications platform, says OCS delivers smoother interconnection of users with each other and the applications they are working from and has the potential for more functionality.
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At the same time, though, the software requires custom coding to interface with the company’s proprietary applications and VoIP gear made by other vendors.
Microsoft OCS 2007 brings e-mail, instant messaging, presence and most importantly, voice and video all together on a single server. The platform is based on session initiation protocol (SIP), which is the signaling and call-management protocol that likely all VoIP gear will ultimately adopt.
The significant difference between OCS and its predecessor, Live Communications Server (LCS), is the addition of VoIP, so the server can act as an IP PBX. VoIP is also supported in Office Communicator Client so a desktop with an OC client could make a softphone call through OCS to another OC client-equipped desktop, says Chris Cullin, Microsoft’s product-management director for unified communications.
Microsoft is so keen on breaking into business VoIP it is even selling a stripped-down version of OCS for use in small businesses as a phone system in conjunction with appliance vendor D-Link.
Using OCS as the main PBX for large corporations, though, is still a ways off. Even Microsoft’s vice president of unified communications positions OCS as supplemental to PBXs today, offering features such as presence and the ability to embed voice in applications that PBXs lack.
But he says Microsoft does have its eye on pushing PBXs out of the way over time. “They can keep their current system in place, and put Office Communicator next to it and slowly phase out the old one,” Gurdeep Singh Pall says.
That is what Mike Fuqua, Global Crossing’s senior vice president of strategic development, has done so far with his beta implementation of OCS. He has the software integrated with Cisco Call Managers, so users with OCS can talk to workers who don’t have it and with the outside world.
As he phases OCS in across all Global Crossing desktops later this year, he plans to integrate the platform with the Avaya PBXs also in the corporate network.
Equally significant as its PBX functionality is the fact that OCS’s VoIP capability can be embedded in applications. So someone working within the Global Crossing order-management/provisioning application called Eon will be able to make phone calls to other workers directly from Eon, Fuqua says.
OCS displays presence information within Eon about who is attached to the network, so workers know who else is available to answer questions when someone needs help, he says. Getting OCS integrated with Eon will take some work by internal programmers at Global Crossing, according to Fuqua, but he expects it to work readily as did the instant-messaging capabilities he embedded in EON from LCS.
Initiating communications directly from within an application keeps workers focused on the task at hand, Fuqua says. Presence also can improve efficiency by reducing the number of unsuccessful attempts to reach others. With presence, people will attempt to reach only those who they know are available. Microsoft calculates that 70% of all business calls made with conventional phones don’t reach the parties being sought and wind up in voicemail, Cullin says.
Microsoft has integrated OCS with its own applications to give more communications options — for instance responding to e-mails from Outlook. If an e-mail has been sent to five people, all will see the presence status of the others in their copies of the e-mail and can click on icons to set up a five-way voice conference call or a joint IM session, Cullin says.
VoIP in OCS is also making corporate mergers easier for Global Crossing, Fuqua says. The day companies are acquired, the new workers will be given OC clients, and their presence information is included in Global Crossing’s intranet directory. That will give them communications capabilities with anyone else at the company via instant messaging and PC-to-PC IP softphone calling, he says. The company already sets up communications channels with new companies via LCS, he says.
In addition to improving communications, Fuqua hopes OCS will save some money, too. OCS will make it possible to get rid of some desktop phones and have workers use their softphones exclusively. “That will allow cost avoidance of upgrading existing handsets as well as help the user to stay focused within their own application,” he says.
While Global Crossing is a service provider, it is using OCS 2007 to support its internal business processes, not as an element of the services it offers to business customers. But the company hopes to extend use of OCS to wholesale customers coming to its Web portal.
If a visitor to the portal site needs help and has IM capabilities or an OCS client, they could click on an icon within the portal to connect to a person within the company, he says. OCS would give these customers presence information for a limited set of Global Crossing employees that are trained to handle these customers, Fuqua says.
While these specific plans will take awhile to implement, Fuqua is also deploying OCS strategically in the hopes of generating more ideas about how it can be used. He is trying to enlist the help of managers about how it might be used within specific departments. “If I’m embedding OCS in an application you use, it starts you thinking about its capabilities,” Fuqua says. “If this is going to be in my group, how will I use it?”
As use of OCS expands and the company becomes dependent on it, Fuqua has to make sure the platform is reliable. “When you look at e-mail, if it’s not working, it causes disruption in the business day,” he says. “When you look at the OCS platform, you’re going down the same path.” Users have to be careful therefore that OCS doesn’t crash.
He recommends looking at high-availability network architectures that leave no single points of failure and distributing servers to support separate user communities so a crash doesn’t bring down the entire company.
Deploying OCS raises the same turf issues that deploying VoIP does, Fuqua says. It requires getting what are perhaps separate IT, telecom and e-mail staffs working together. “The telecom guy will say, ‘You’re taking away my environment,’ which you are,” Fuqua says. “But it’s to bring down economic costs and improve efficiency.”
Even though OCS 2007 doesn’t ship until July, Fuqua has a wish list for future features. These include biometric identification of users to Active Directory, so their presence information can be advertised to appropriate applications even when they log in from borrowed machines. So a worker could log in from a thin-client PC and pull up all their applications from their current point of access.
He’d also like to see support for speech recognition, so users could speak commands to their applications and trigger OCS communications channels.
