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| Unified Communications Roadmap |
| Oct. 2, 2006 |
Microsoft's unified communications products will get major updates in the first half of 2007. Unified communications technologies aim to simplify business communications by providing a common infrastructure for e-mail, instant messaging (IM), voice, video, and other channels. Upcoming planks in Microsoft's own unified communications platform will include Exchange Server 2007, which adds support for voice mail and voice access to e-mail; Live Meeting 2007, a significant update to Microsoft's existing Web conferencing service; and Communications Server 2007, a major upgrade to the Live Communications Server 2005 IM and voice-over-IP (VoIP) product. Microsoft's Unified Communications Push Microsoft executives claim that today's communications landscape is "chaos"—a myriad of real-time and store-and-forward communications options and their associated networks and devices plagued by incompatibility and complexity. Microsoft believes that with the help of partners the company can, over time, unify most forms of communications onto a common network and server infrastructure, with support for multiple types of devices. From an IT perspective, convergence means all communications would eventually flow over a single IP-based networking infrastructure and be monitored and managed by a common console, resulting in much simpler set-up and administration. To users, "unified" means that communications tools would be far more capable and easier to use. For example:
While implementation of the full unified communications vision is years away, Microsoft will take a significant step forward in 2007. Microsoft's unified communications product lineup for 2007 consists of Exchange Server 2007 to handle store-and-forward communications (e.g., "asynchronous" messages such as e-mail, voice mail, and fax) and a combination of Live Meeting 2007 and Communications Server 2007 to handle real-time communications such as IM, voice calls, and video conferences. (See the illustration "Unified Communications Roadmap Overview".) Microsoft believes that the total worldwide market for unified communications products in 2009 will be approximately US$45 billion. The main revenue opportunities for Microsoft are selling its newer unified communications products (such as Communications Server) and up-selling customers to the additional Client Access Licenses (CALs) that will be required for users to access new unified communications features in established products, such as Exchange. For partners, the main opportunity is in professional services, integrating existing communications components, such as phone systems, into unified communications systems on Microsoft's platform or migrating existing functions, such as voice telephony, to the new platform. Exchange Server 2007 Exchange Server 2007 will bring Microsoft's widely used e-mail product into the world of unified communications with new unified messaging features for managing voice communications and voice access to e-mail. Specifically, Exchange 2007 will be able to interface with an organization's existing private branch exchange (PBX) and put a user's voice mail and incoming faxes into the same inbox as e-mail. Exchange 2007 will also enable a user to access to this unified inbox—including calendar, contacts lists, and corporate directory—from a PC, Web client, or mobile e-mail client, as well as from a standard telephone using voice commands. In earlier versions of Exchange, unified inbox and telephone access capabilities require the addition of third-party solutions from vendors such as Avaya. A unified inbox will cut down the number of places users need to check and helps users prioritize and organize their messages. The ability to issue voice commands over a standard phone, to navigate e-mail messages and personal calendar, and to have the information "read" back—a feature Microsoft calls Outlook Voice Access—will be especially useful when a user is traveling and may not have immediate access to a PC or have hands free to operate a personal digital assistant (PDA) or other mobile device. For corporate IT, Exchange 2007's unified messaging features promise lower ongoing maintenance costs by consolidating e-mail, voice mail, and incoming fax services into a single system. For example, provisioning new employees will become easier without a separate voice mail directory to maintain, and applying a common set of security, retention, and backup policies to all message types becomes more practical. The advantages of consolidation are even stronger for customers who today have separate voice mail systems at each branch location. However, while Exchange's e-mail capabilities are mature and have a reputation for reliability, the new voice capabilities have yet to establish a track record. How the Unified Inbox Handles Voice Mail and Fax To a person leaving a voice mail message, Exchange 2007 will be indistinguishable from the typical voice mail system it replaces. Callers will be able to search the organization's directory for a name and connect to the telephone of (or leave a message for) members of the organization. To users with inboxes on the Exchange 2007 system, a voice mail message will appear very similar to an e-mail containing an audio attachment. If the call originates from within the organization, the caller's name will be listed in the message's "From" field. For outside calls, if the caller-ID information available consists only of a phone number, Exchange will try to determine the caller's name by performing reverse lookups in the corporation's Active Directory and/or the user's contacts list. Users will be able to play back voice-mail messages on whatever interface or device they are using, whether it be Outlook 2003 or 2007 on a PC, a browser-based client accessing Outlook Web Access (OWA) 2007, a mobile device that has Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync enabled (such as a Windows Mobile-powered Smartphone or PDA), or a standard telephone. If a PC user is using Outlook 2007 or OWA 2007 and the machine doesn't have speakers, or if a higher level of privacy is required, users will be able to redirect message playback to a telephone number. As with e-mails, users will be able to sort voice mails into folders and process them with rules. Since Exchange does not perform speech-to-text conversion on the voice mail audio, users won't be able to search on contents of voice mails as they can with e-mail messages. However, Outlook 2007 and OWA 2007 users will have the ability to add notes manually to a voice mail, and subsequently search those notes. Exchange 2007 will be able to route faxes automatically to users who have their own specific fax numbers. If a single fax number is shared among a department or other group, human intervention is required for proper routing. (Exchange 2007 includes a Fax Routing Assistant utility to help in this circumstance.) Faxes will be represented as images; Exchange 2007 will not have the ability to perform optical character recognition on incoming fax messages as do some third-party computerized fax solutions. Exchange 2007 will not support outbound faxing, although Office and Windows do. Accessing the Unified Inbox from a Telephone Users will be able to call into Exchange 2007 from a telephone and navigate unified inboxes and personal calendars by pressing buttons on the telephone keypad or by speaking voice commands. Text-to-speech capabilities inherited from Speech Server will allow Exchange 2007 to read back e-mail header information (such as timestamp, from, and subject), e-mail contents (but not attachments), incoming meeting requests, and details of appointments already on the user's calendar. (For more information on Speech Server's functionality being absorbed into other products, see the sidebar "What Happened to Speech Server?".) Both the keypad and voice command interfaces allow users to perform a variety of tasks other than reading back messages, including accepting or declining meeting requests, deleting e-mail and voice mail messages, and managing their schedule. For example, a user can phone in and tell the system that they are running 15 minutes late to an upcoming meeting, cancel their participation in the meeting, or clear their schedule for a certain period of time and all other affected participants will automatically be notified via e-mail. Exchange 2007 Roadmap Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 beta 2 was released at the end of July 2006, and the production release is expected in late 2006 or early 2007. Exchange Server 2007 will be offered in an x86-64 version only; no 32-bit version will be available. Language support will be limited when Exchange Server 2007 ships. The Automatic Speech Recognition module that supports voice commands will be offered only for English. Microsoft has yet to list what other languages will be supported and on what timetable. However, at release, standard voice prompts (e.g., "Please enter your PIN") and the text-to-speech capabilities required for "read back" will be available for more than a dozen languages: Dutch, English (Australia), English (UK), English (US), French (Canada), French (France), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (PRC), Mandarin (ROC), Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), and Swedish. Communications Server Since its introduction in 2003, Live Communications Server (LCS) has served as the cornerstone of Microsoft's real-time communications efforts. LCS and its associated Communicator client are designed for IM and audio or video calls. These sessions tend to be between small groups of people with everyone as peers (i.e., able to talk whenever they like and able to see video of other participants) and are likely to be unscheduled. LCS acts as a central repository for user presence information—including which computing device a person is currently using and the person's current status, such as "online," "in a meeting," or "do not disturb." LCS uses presence information to support IM and file transfer among small groups of people, as well as person-to-person voice and video. LCS uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to initiate communications sessions and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) to support IM and presence. (For a more detailed overview of the functions LCS performs, see the sidebar "What Is Live Communications Server?" on page 4 of the Jan. 2005 Update.) Over the past three years, the LCS team has steadily expanded who can participate in real-time communications, focusing first on employees directly connected to the corporate LAN, and later improving support for remote employees, employees at other associated ("federated") firms, and nonemployees connected across the Internet. The team has also expanded the modes with which participants can communicate, first making presence information and IM easily accessible to all participants and then broadening this to include real-time audio and video communications, including integration with existing telephony (PBX) systems. Finally, the LCS team has steadily made the product more enterprise-capable by improving scalability, availability, and manageability with better bandwidth efficiency, load-balancing and failover, and other improvements. Communications Server 2007 Improvements The next version of LCS, Communications Server 2007, includes the following enhancements: Multiparty video and audio calls. With LCS 2005, VoIP-based audio and video calls made between Communicator clients are one-to-one only; it is not possible to add additional parties on the call unless the customer adds third-party software and hardware. Communications Server 2007 will support VoIP-based audio and video calls involving more than a dozen endpoints, and will include new audio technology that mixes all participants' voices so that no person's voice gets cut off when several people talk at the same time. Within each participant's Communicator 2007 client, the active speaker's Web cam video stream will be displayed in the main video pane and the participant's Web cam video stream will be displayed in a small picture-within-a-picture so that he will see the image others see. If any participant has other people in his office, and is using Microsoft's upcoming RoundTable 360-degree conferencing camera as his office Web cam, RoundTable will automatically broadcast the image of the active speaker. VoIP functions across firewalls without VPNs. With LCS 2005, PC users outside of the corporate firewall need to establish a VPN connection if they want to use Communicator to send or receive VoIP-based audio or video calls with others on the system. Communications Server 2007 will eliminate this requirement by extending LCS 2005's existing edge proxy to accommodate users outside the organization's firewall. On-premise Web conferencing. With LCS 2005, if a user wants to conduct a conference with several people using more than just IM (e.g., present a slide deck with audio), he must use Microsoft's subscription-based Live Meeting service or a third-party product. Communications Server 2007 will include a self-contained on-premise version of the Live Meeting 2007 service, which will use the same client-side software as the Microsoft-hosted Live Meeting service. (For more details on Live Meeting, see the section "Live Meeting 2007" below.) The Live Meeting functions built into Communications Server 2007 will be able to handle up to several hundred participants; users outside the organization will be able to participate, but they will not be able to schedule a conference and their participation will require the purchase of a special connector license. The hosted Live Meeting service will remain the venue of choice if very large numbers of participants need to be accommodated, or if the conference sponsor requires some feature unique to the Live Meeting service, such as Web-based registration and scheduling tools. Routing incoming PBX and PSTN calls to Communicator. Although LCS 2005 allows users to place outgoing calls to PBX extensions or traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) users via the Communicator client application, support for incoming calls is limited. Communicator users can receive a pop-up window notifying them of incoming PBX/PSTN calls and use Communicator to access the PBX's call control capabilities (e.g., a Communicator user working remotely could forward the call coming in to her PBX extension onto her cell phone), but are unable to take the call via Communicator—they still need to use a regular phone. This limitation will be removed in Communications Server 2007. Call control features for VoIP calls. LCS 2005 allows Communicator users to place and receive VoIP calls from other Communicator users; however, it does not provide basic PBX-style call control features for such calls. Communications Server 2007 will add this functionality. For example, with Communications Server 2007, a Communicator user will be able to forward an incoming VoIP call to a cell phone or join other users on an existing VoIP call. Communications Server Roadmap A beta of Communications Server (officially, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007) is planned by the end of 2006, and a production release in the second quarter of 2007. Communications Server 2007 will be available in a 32-bit edition only. This is an odd limitation, particularly given that Exchange 2007 will ship only in a 64-bit edition. Clients for Communications Server Microsoft offers a variety of clients to interface with Communications Server: Communicator for installation on Windows 2000 or Windows XP PCs, Communicator Web Access (CWA) to allow interaction through a standard browser, and Communicator Mobile for Windows Mobile devices. Microsoft is also licensing Communicator software to third parties who will offer Communicator-based devices such as desktop phones. Communicator Communicator 2005 is the preferred PC client for LCS today. Even though the Windows Messenger 5.x client software that ships with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 can be used in conjunction with LCS 2005, Communicator is a more capable voice client than Windows Messenger: with LCS 2005 and an interface to the PBX, Communicator users can control their PBX phones to place, hold, forward, and transfer both point-to-point and conference calls. Communicator also offers an improved user interface that enables users to employ a consolidated, searchable contact list with records drawn from Active Directory, Exchange, and Outlook. A Communicator 2007 client update is planned in conjunction with Communications Server in 2007, with a beta expected before the end of 2006 and a production version in the second quarter of 2007. The updated client will be required to exploit Communications Server 2007's new features, such as multiparty video and audio calls, and PBX-style call control features for VoIP-based calls. Communicator 2007 will also offer better integration with Outlook, such as the ability to save an IM conversation to e-mail. Communicator Web Access Like Exchange's Outlook Web Access, a server-based application that provides a browser-based alternative to using the full Outlook client, Communicator Web Access (CWA) enables users to swap IMs and share presence information with LCS using a browser. Released in Dec. 2005, CWA supports LCS users who cannot or do not want to install Communicator, such as users connecting from public computers. CWA lacks many features of the Communicator desktop client. For example, it can't support LCS's remote-call control and VoIP telephony functions, and it does not support video conferencing or file transfers. In addition, it cannot update LCS with very detailed or accurate presence information—it can't tell the difference between a user who has walked away from her computer and is therefore unavailable and one who is still present but has been using other applications. These same limitations will persist with the introduction of CWA 2007, which will be bundled with Communications Server 2007. Communicator Mobile Communicator Mobile Access, released Apr. 2006, lets users of Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition and Windows Mobile 5.0 devices exchange presence and instant messages with other LCS users and conduct VoIP calls with users on PCs or Windows Mobile devices (but only if a Wi-Fi network is available). With the introduction of Communications Server 2007, the name of the mobile client will be shortened to Communicator Mobile. The most notable feature improvement is support for Communications Server 2007's multiparty calling capability. Communicator-Based Phones from Third Parties Microsoft is licensing Communicator software to third parties, including LG-Nortel, Polycom, and Thomson Telecom. In 2007, these partners plan to offer IP-enabled business desktop phones that work with Communications Server 2007. These devices will look similar to today's desktop phones, with screen and selection keys that allow users to scan the availability of contacts and initiate communications by touching people's names on the screen. Live Meeting 2007 Live Meeting is a hosted subscription service that enables users to conduct online meetings and events, typically in conjunction with a separate voice teleconferencing service. (The formal name for the service is Microsoft Office Live Meeting; it was called PlaceWare before its acquisition by Microsoft in 2003.) Live Meeting events typically consist of a presentation with slides and/or a whiteboard, and a one-way audio stream out to attendees. Conferences tend to be scheduled in advance, have a specific agenda, and be run by a presenter(s). For example, if there are many participants, the presenter will likely exercise tight control over who can talk and when. Live Meeting is sold directly by Microsoft, is available in volume licensing, and is resold by audio conferencing providers such as BT, Intercall, and Verizon/MCI. Users access meetings through either a Windows-based meeting console (which must be installed before the meeting) or a Web-based browser console. Live Meeting 2007 (not necessarily the final name) conferencing capabilities will be folded into the upcoming Communications Server 2007 product while also continuing to be available as a Microsoft-hosted service. This means that organizations using Communications Server 2007 will be able to host internal Live Meeting conferences without relying on Microsoft's outside service. (For more details on Communications Server, see the Communications Server section above). Live Meeting 2007 Improvements Both the server and hosted editions of Live Meeting 2007 will include the following major improvements: Two-way computer audio. Today's Live Meeting service can stream the presenter's audio over Internet, but doesn't allow event attendees on PCs with microphones to communicate with the presenter or others in the meeting—they have to dial in on a separate phone line or use a text chat feature. With Live Meeting 2007, conference attendees using PCs with microphones will be able to communicate with the presenter and other attendees using VoIP; all listeners will hear blended audio of all inputs, and the presenters will be able to control which attendees' microphones are active. For example, in a small conference everyone's microphone could be active, but in a large conference, the presenter could mute all attendee microphones except for one of the attendees who clicks on the "I have a question" icon on their Live Meeting client. One feature included in the hosted service, but not in the on-premise version of Live Meeting 2007, is the ability to support two-way voice communications with attendees who don't have microphones attached to their PCs. Such attendees will be able to call in via a third-party audio conferencing provider. Video of the presenter. Unlike today's Live Meeting service, Live Meeting 2007 will be able to provide participants with real-time Web cam video of the presenters. If several presenters are in a conference room equipped with one of Microsoft's upcoming RoundTable video camera devices, a 360-degree video of the entire conference room will show up in one pane of each attendee's Live Meeting client and a close-up video of the active person (talking) in another pane. Better support for audio and video content within a presentation. Using today's Live Meeting service, it isn't practical to incorporate Windows Media video clips or Flash animations into a presentation. The audio won't be heard by conference participants and the video is likely to be very choppy. This is because such content must be made available to participants through application sharing, which uses protocols that don't support sound and are not optimized for fast changing video/animation sequences. With Live Meeting 2007, presenters will be able to upload Windows Media or Flash content to the server, which will know how to push it down to Live Meeting client software where the audio and video will then be rendered with far greater fidelity. Not only will this improve the real time conference experience but it will also improve recording quality for conferences in which the presenter instructed Live Meeting to record the conference. New virtual breakout rooms. With the Live Meeting 2007 service (but not the on-premise version), conference attendees will be able to go back and forth between a large conference, with all in attendance, and multiple breakouts, each with a subset of attendees. For example, in a single Live Meeting session, 20 participants could conference for one hour, split up into four breakout groups of five people for another hour, and then all come back together as a large group for a final hour. In the absence of this virtual breakout room feature, this example would involve the overhead of administering six different conference sessions. Live Meeting 2007 Roadmap Live Meeting 2007 is expected to go into beta in late 2006 and go into service in the second quarter of 2007. Communications Server 2007 with the built-in Live Meeting functionality is also expected to go into beta later this year and ship in the second quarter of 2007. Assessing the Unified Communications Platform Organizations assessing Microsoft's unified communications product lineup for 2007 should be sure to consider the following: Necessity for PBX integration. Exchange Server 2007's unified messaging features are completely dependent on integration with the organization's existing PBX systems. Also, in the absence of PBX integration, Communications Server is its own island, allowing users with a Communicator client to IM and place audio or video VoIP calls with other Communicator users only. In most cases, connecting the existing PBX to systems based on Exchange Server 2007 and Communications Server 2007 will require a special gateway specifically designed to work with the organization's particular brand and model of PBX. (Microsoft estimates that gateways will be available for the majority of PBXs currently in service.) Substantial reprogramming of the current PBX will likely be required as well. Because of the potential complexity, most organizations will need the assistance of specialized systems integrators. Licensing costs. Customers choosing to avail themselves of the new features in Exchange Server 2007 or Communications Server 2007 will see the cost of the associated Client Access Licenses (CALs) rise significantly. To use the new unified messaging features in Exchange Server 2007, each user will require a new Exchange 2007 Enterprise CAL, in addition to an Exchange 2007 Standard CAL. Exchange customers who currently have Software Assurance upgrade rights on their existing Exchange Standard CALs will have to pay an additional fee to get Enterprise CALs for Exchange 2007. Although Microsoft has not officially announced how Communications Server 2007 will be licensed, the same is likely to be true for current LCS 2005 customers—they'll likely require a new Enterprise CAL to access new Communications Server 2007 features, such as hosting on-premise Live Meeting conferences. Resources For more information about Exchange Server 2007 unified messaging, see the white paper "Unified Messaging in Exchange Server 2007" at www.microsoft.com/exchange/preview/default.mspx. Exchange Server 2007 Beta 2 documentation is available at www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/default.mspx. An in-depth description of Live Meeting 2005 can be found in "Live Meeting Updates Aid Corporate Web Conferences" on page 16 of the Jan. 2005 Update. For more detail about LCS 2005 and LCS 2005 SP1, see "Taking Another Stab at Telephony" on page 9 of the Oct. 2005 Update, "LCS 2005 Takes Corporate IM Beyond the Firewall" on page 3 of the Jan. 2005 Update, "Live Communications Server 2005 to Link with AOL, Yahoo, MSN" on page 14 of the Sept. 2004 Update, and "Live Communications Server 2005 Taking Shape" on page 20 of the Jun. 2004 Update. Versions of the Communicator client are covered in "IM, VoIP, Conferencing Roadmap Unveiled" on page 10 of the Apr. 2005 Update, "Communicator Goes Mobile" on page 12 of the Apr. 2006 Update, and "New Web Client for Live Communication Server" on page 7 of the Feb. 2006 Update. |
