It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Microsoft Office Communications Server. It does a lot of things very well. However, in my experience over the last 3+ years there’s at least one it doesn’t: Voice. This was brought up by customers repeatedly and Microsoft’s answer was always that they planned to partner with the best in the voice world. We’ve seen many of those partnerships happen since the launch last October. Microsoft has announced strategic partnerships with Nortel, Avaya, Polycom and other established powers in the voice world. However, we haven’t seen Microsoft offer anything compelling themselves in the voice arena.
[url=http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid186_gci1279840,00.html]Zeus Keravalla[/url] made some great points on the deficiency of OCS for voice. That’s not to say OCS doesn’t play a role in your voice strategy, just that it alone shouldn’t be your voice strategy. Put simply, OCS is a great unified communications tool but it’s not such a great IP PBX.
There’s a lot of potential for Microsoft to extend their current partnerships and get their foot in the door in the voice world. Perhaps in the next version of OCS we’ll see a more complete IP PBX feature-set and a wider ecosystem of peripherals.
