By Rob Helm [bio]
Posted: Oct. 15, 2007

The following an excerpt of a Research Report published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Contributing Analysts: Chris Alliegro, Rob Horwitz, and Matt Rosoff

Communications Server 2007 is Microsoft's latest platform for unified communications, which provides instant messaging, user presence, voice, e-mail, and other communications services over a single network and directory infrastructure. Unified communications promises to reduce ongoing equipment and service charges, simplify management, and make communication more efficient for users. Communications Server 2007 will be a more credible unified communications platform than past versions thanks to dramatically improved voice features and new support for Web conferences, which combine voice with synchronized PowerPoint presentations and other data sharing features. However, unified communications technology is relatively new and imposes significant upfront costs, so most organizations will move in stages as the technology and Microsoft's offerings are proven.

This report outlines the major improvements in Communications Server and related applications, focusing on the key new capabilities that support unified communications. It summarizes many small improvements in instant messaging and presence, describes substantially new capabilities for voice and phone integration, and evaluates new Web conferencing features. The report also projects upcoming releases for the product line, and explains the product line's licensing model, including the tradeoffs between buying licenses individually versus buying them in Microsoft's enterprise license bundles.