Microsoft's marriage of easy communications

We've been watching the romance develop between OCS (Office Communications Server 2007) and Exchange Server 2007 since OCS became available in beta earlier this year. When OCS finally came of age last month, we brought the mature couple together for a Hawaiian wedding.

To conduct this ceremony, Oliver donned his floral print shirt and straw hat and headed off to Honolulu and the Advanced Network Computing Lab at the University of Hawaii. There, lab director Brian Chee set up the testbed, and Microsoft flew in two capable representatives to manage the installation and run us through the new features before OCS and Exchange were joined in VoIP union.

Overall, our upbeat view of Exchange Server 2007 hasn't changed since we examined Beta 2 back in August of 2006. For both users and admins, Exchange 2007 is a good upgrade, and Service Pack 1 makes it even better (see "Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 packs plenty"). OCS has matured noticeably from our early-beta look. Blending Web and video conferencing, instant messaging, and VoIP telephony, this communications platform is very slick, but has significant back-end requirements, especially in large deployments.

Office Communications Server 2007

There’s an element of confusion surrounding exactly how Exchange 2007 and OCS play together -- who brings what to the sandbox. Exchange boasts several new features under its Unified Messaging banner, and OCS waves flags like IM, Web conferencing, and enterprise VoIP. There’s some overlap, so let’s get that out of the way.

Click for larger view.

Exchange 2007’s Unified Messaging capabilities revolve around the term “anywhere access.” Have a Web connection? Exchange can serve up the OWA (Outlook Web Access) works with a dollop of sour cream. Have a cell phone? Exchange can connect you to your Exchange data via mobile Web or as a direct client. Stuck with an ordinary phone? Exchange can read your e-mail to you in an electronic voice. On the flip side, your inbox can pretty much suck in anything anyone is likely to send you save for snail mail and IMs. E-mail, voice mail, video mail, faxes… Exchange can handle it all, and serve it up to Outlook or Office Communicator (the OCS client) or their mobile equivalents. Naturally, with the exception of e-mail, Exchange is just the target, not the source. Voice mail requires appropriate PBX connectivity as does fax reception. That’s where OCS comes in.

Provided your Exchange 2007 server farm includes at least one server running the Unified Messaging role, Exchange can serve as the voicemail repository for OCS users. Otherwise, Exchange’s features and functions remain the same whether OCS is a neighbor or not -- a good thing considering Exchange administrators moving to Exchange 2007 have enough to worry about.