Microsoft launched today the new Office Communications Server 2007.

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 is the first Microsoft product to combine enterprise-ready IM (instant messaging), presence, conferencing, and VoIP (Voice over IP) telephony in a fully integrated unified communications solution.

Office Communications Server 2007 provides richer presence capabilities, enhanced support for group IM, and improved deployment and management than its predecessor, Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 SP1. To existing features, such as federation and public IM connectivity, Office Communications Server 2007 includes real-time conferencing hosted on servers inside your organization’s firewall and a full-featured, software-powered VoIP solution that can stand on its own or integrate easily with an existing PBX infrastructure.

Like Live Communications Server 2005, Office Communications Server 2007 is available in two editions, Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition:

• Standard Edition. Hosts all server components, as well as the database for storing user and conference information, on a single computer. Standard Edition provides full functionality for small organizations.
• Enterprise Edition. Separates server functionality from data storage to achieve higher capacity and availability. An Enterprise Edition pool typically consists of two or more Front End Servers, which are fronted by a hardware load balancer and connected to a Back-End Database. (It is also possible to deploy a single Front End Server without a load balancer.) Optionally, certain conferencing components can be deployed on separate computers for higher capacity and availability. Enterprise Edition is appropriate for medium, large, and very large organizations.

Both editions support the full suite of IM, presence, conferencing, and VoIP features.

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