What Else Is New in Office Communicator?

Office Communicator 2005 is basically an upgrade to Windows Messenger 5.1, the client for Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005. While Communicator is a key element of Microsoft’s overall telephony solution, it is also valuable even to organizations that don’t choose to add telephony capabilities to LCS’s instant messaging (IM) and presence functions.

Some of Communicator’s interesting new features are as follows:

Exchange and Active Directory (AD) integration. LCS 2005 SP1 has a new Address Book Service that pulls user and contact data, such as addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, out of AD and publishes them for automatic download to Communicator clients. This makes it possible for users to access this information easily through Communicator’s “Find” box. Another feature allows users to save session text as an e-mail that appears in their Exchange e-mail box. (Normally, IM sessions are discarded when a conversation window is closed.)

Live Meeting integration. Communicator integrates with the ActiveX-based client for Microsoft’s Live Meeting data conferencing service, which makes it easy to set up an ad hoc Live Meeting conference with others in a user’s Communicator contact list.