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Thursday, June 28, 2007

Microsoft's OCS weighs in as a stronger UM vehicle than IP-PBX

Network World

Product Test and Buyer's Guide




Product Test and Buyer's Guide, 06/28/07

By Christine Burns

In Tuesday’s edition of this newsletter, we pointed readers to our test of the beta code for Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) in which engineers from Network World Lab Alliance partner Miercom assessed how it stacks up to the wide range of SIP-based IP-PBX systems they’ve tested over the past five.

To test OCS in that fashion was our idea, not Microsoft’s. We did so because Microsoft includes most of the IP-PBX features necessary to compete in smaller environments. Taken in that light, OCS holds its own even if it lacks some of the more enterprise worthy IP-PBX features such as call park and whisper page as well as many of the call-routing and call-handling features.

But it has always been Microsoft’s stated marketing contention that you really can’t achieve the full benefits of OCS unless it’s running in a full Microsoft environment replete 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.

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Miercom also tested OCS from this angle and concluded that the complete package does indeed serve up easy end user access to e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging and conferencing capabilities from the same interface.

Obviously, this is an all-Microsoft all the time endeavor. If you care to make a comparison on how OCS stacks up against the non-Microsoft unified communications competition in terms of platforms supported as well as feature sets available, you can tap into the Network World Unified Messaging Buyer’s Guide for detailed information a half dozen other products in that space.

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Contact the author:
Christine Burns is the Executive Editor of Testing. She can be reached at cburns@nww.com

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