* Network World Buyer's Guide spells out the VoIP management options in detail
During an analyst roundtable discussion at last week’s Network World’s IT Roadmap conference in Boston, Jim Metzler, president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, said that while IT folks have a pretty good handle on general network management tasks, they, as a rule, fall down on end-to-end application monitoring and management.
On Monday, Microsoft is expected to release its first public beta of the software that lies at the core of its unified communications platform.
The server software itself will be dubbed Office Communications Server (OCS). Its client counterpart is named Office Communicator (OC). According to Senior Editor John Fontana’s news story on this topic, OCS, which features native support for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), allows users to instantly launch a phone call from Office 2007 applications, such as Word, Outlook, or OC, by simply clicking on a highlighted name of another user.
Fontana explains that Microsoft also is positioning OCS 2007 alongside Exchange 2007, which was released late last year, as a unified messaging platform. Exchange integrates with OCS 2007 to support its built-in auto-attendant for answering and routing inbound voice calls as well as unified messaging that unifies voice mail and e-mail in a single inbox.
OCS is certainly an ambitious endeavor, Network World Lab Alliance partner Miercom will take a very close look at that beta code when it’s available and report back on what promise the new software does or doesn’t hold for enterprise network communications. But for the moment, let’s assume that Microsoft does indeed get it right on this its first shot at establishing Windows-driven VoIP network underpinnings. Are you willing to trust that the calls your CEO places to your top customers via this Microsoft-specific platform are of the voice quality to which they are all accustomed?
There is a growing field of VoIP Analysis and Management Tools that can help you carefully track voice traffic traveling across your data network. We’ve got detailed information on more than a dozen in the Network Buyer’s Guide. From the guide you can compare and contrast the products and jump right to several reviews of these products that Network World has conducted. These resources can help you prepare your network for the onslaught of Microsoft-enabled VoIP traffic.
