'Istanbul' adds telephony support to instant messaging and conferencing.
Microsoft last week unveiled the first corporate client for its real-time communications server with an emphasis on adding telephony support to collaboration capabilities such as instant messaging and conferencing.
Microsoft last week unveiled the first corporate client for its real-time communications server with an emphasis on adding telephony support to collaboration capabilities such as instant messaging and conferencing.
The company says the client – code-named Istanbul – lets users click on an icon to initiate phone calls to others they see online through the presence capabilities of Microsoft Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005 and integration with third-party TDM and IP PBXs. The client also will accept calls from switches that support Session Initiation Protocol and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions.
Istanbul supports many call features including call forwarding.
It serves as the client to LCS 2005, which is slated to ship in December, and also includes IM and PC-based voice and video capabilities. A set of component object model-based APIs allows presence information from LCS to extend to other applications.
“This is an effort toward integrating legacy phone systems into Microsoft’s communication software,” says Peter Pawlak, an analyst with independent research firm Directions on Microsoft. He says the capability lets users integrate their desktop phone with their software-based desktop communication and collaboration tools.
For example, an Istanbul user could see on a buddy list that a colleague was online and click a phone icon to ring the colleague’s phone. The user would then pick up his own phone handset. The colleague also could see the incoming call in the Istanbul client and transfer it to his cell phone by changing his presence settings. The connection to the PBX would handle all the telephony features.
However, Pawlak says Istanbul is not a VoIP client. “There is not a VoIP phone that plugs into the wall and works with LCS with no PBX at all. That does not exist from Microsoft.”
But Istanbul, which will go in to beta within the next two months, does have a range of features including presence information that can be integrated with applications such as the scheduling capabilities in Microsoft Exchange. LCS already supports presence integration with Office and Outlook. Future versions of the client will align Istanbul with the managed-code environment of .Net and ease application integration, experts say.
“We believe that Istanbul will do to the real-time collaboration desktop client market what Outlook has done in the e-mail market,” the Meta Group’s Matt Cain wrote in a research note.
Istanbul, which was developed by Microsoft’s real-time collaboration group, is one of many real-time clients the group will create including versions for mobile devices and the Web.
Istanbul is slated to ship in the first half of 2005. Pricing has not yet been released.
