On the desktop, it’s all about Office Communicator 2007, though Outlook 2007 and the rest of the Office 2007 suite are a good idea, too. Someone running a call via Communicator, for example, might pop open OneNote to jot down some notes. OneNote will automatically grab the OCS call information from Communicator, including the subject, date and time, and even the other users on the call. All of a sudden you have to try to lose your meeting notes.

This kind of cross-app communication is OCS’ real reason to live. Communicator is the main client interface, but Microsoft’s design goal for OCS was to enable one-click communication from as many places within the Office client/server suite as possible. For the most part, Microsoft has succeeded. The price tag is a little high for our taste (especially when you consider all the secondary servers a full OCS implementation will require in an enterprise setting), but for companies that will truly make use of this level of communication flexibility, the greenbacks are well worth it. If you’re already running chunks of the Office server suite, then don’t buy a SIP PBX or a conferencing platform without trying your hand at OCS first.

Exchange Server 2007
Since our test of the Exchange 2007 beta last August, we’ve encountered the new e-mail platform in the course of several other tests, sometimes with mixed results. During this period, Exchange went from beta 2 all the way to shipping code and now has a service pack pecking its way to final release.

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One key point from the beta preview bears repeating: Exchange 2007 is a big change from Exchange 2003. Deploying Exchange 2007 will make your mail server management life easier in the long run, but it will have short-term impacts on your physical server budget, the number of servers in your racks, your day-to-day management tools, and even the way your users access their messaging and scheduling data. You’ll have better security, better redundancy, easier management overall, but even experienced Exchange administrators will have to learn new ways of doing things. Furthermore, if you buy into several critical new capabilities, you will probably need to run more instances of the server to support the same number of users, and that means more points of potential failure. For example, Exchange 2007 gives Windows Mobile smartphones full network citizenship, with their own mail accounts, which can add a whole new dimension of desktop management headaches if you’re not careful.

Exchange 2007's new hardware requirements aren't limited to the 64-bit-only support. Industry feathers were ruffled when Microsoft announced that Exchange was going 64-bit only (and that it wasn’t going to be the only server in Redmond’s family to go that route), but after a year of reflection, we think the 64-bit move was a solid choice on Microsoft’s part. First, most servers sold during the past two years are already 64-bit capable and that trend is only going to increase. Second, moving to a 64-bit CPU means that more RAM can be used to cache the message database and that means faster performance and less strain on the server’s disk system. It’s the future, deal with it.