Unified Communications Roadmap

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.