The long awaited public beta of Internet Explorer was finally released yesterday, and while it’s probably best left to it pro’s and enthusiasts for now, it shows a lot of promise. Much improved performance, much better support for web standards, including HTML5 are coupled with changes to the user interface all designed to make it quicker and easier to use.

Read more at :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11315819

Well, today, Microsoft have made available the release candidate of the successor to Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/evalcenter/ff808407.aspx

The big surprise is that the product is no longer Communications Server “14” or even Communications Server 2010. It’s been known for a while that the word Office was being dropped from the name (as in communications server rather than office communications server), but I didn’t expect this! The new name for Microsoft’s real time unified communications platform is:

To be more specific, the server component is Microsoft Lync Server 2010, while the client (formerly communicator) is simply Lync 2010.

At first, I wondered what the product group were doing, throwing away the Communications Server branding, however, the more I think about it the more it grows on me.

Just like Exchange has become synonymous with enterprise email, I believe that Lync will do the same for unified communications, for example, “Making a Lync call”

It’s a great move and makes talking about the product much easier, “Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2” always was a bit of a mouthful!

At Digital IP, we’ve been working with Microsoft for the last few months as part of the partner Technical Readiness Program, helping us get up to speed with the beta’s of Lync. This has included spending time with the product group in Redmond and having our staff go through “ignite” training.

I’m very excited by the new product and the opportunity it presents, both for us and for our customers to realise real world cost savings and productivity enhancements.

One thing is for sure, the next few months will be a rollercoaster ride as we complete our internal deployment, customer deployment and get ramped up for launch events.

We will be running a series of launch events in various locations before the end of the year. Stay tuned for more information and sign up when they become available to be one of the first to see Lync live in action!

In the meantime, you can read more on the Microsoft website:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/sep10/lyncpr.mspx

Other RC downloads include:

Lync Planning Tool:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=bcd64040-40c4-4714-9e68-c649785cc43a

Lync Attendee (Admin Install)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=1772a5ad-9688-4861-8387-ec30411bf455

Lync Attendee (User Install)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=68a3ca04-a058-4e47-98ea-9e9af7ebd6e3

Microsoft quietly released this video of a session from Techdays in Belgium earlier this month in which some of the new voice capabilities of the next version of OCS are shown. This includes a live demo of one of the new Polycom IP Phones.

Link Here – TechDays 2010: New Voice and Infrastructure in Microsoft Communications Server “14”.

Well, that’s not the case, and in fact, it’s very easy to change the ringtone and many of the other sounds generated by Communicator.

In communicator, go into the Tools menu, then select Options. Click on Alerts and you get the following dialog:

Click configure sounds, and you’ll get the standard Windows sound configuration dialog:

Scroll down the list until you get to Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2, and you can now change the default sounds for pretty much any Wav file you like! Just select the sound you want to change then browse to an appropriate file.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2009/12/wired-for-sound-how-sip-won-the-voip-protocol-wars.ars

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/01/voip-in-depth-an-introduction-to-the-sip-protocol-part-1.ars

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/guides/2010/03/voip-in-depth-an-introduction-to-the-sip-protocol-part-2.ars

There are a number of steps to run through before installing OCS 2007 R2 on top of Server 2008 R2. Note that it’s not supported to upgrade an existing Windows 2008 Server already running OCS 2007 to R2.

Note also, that group chat is not supported in a 2008 R2 DOMAIN.

There are a couple of relevant KB articles:

Office Communications Server 2007 R2, OCS 2007 or LCS 2005 does not work correctly after you upgrade to Windows Server 2008 R2 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982020/

Supportability is available for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 member server role on a Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982021/

The first article is about the domain, and problems that can occur with OCS when upgrading a domain controller in the existing domain to Server 2008 R2.

Unified Communications Success Stories

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/2010office/imageGallery.aspx

The location information looks very interesting –

“A user’s location can be auto detected from the subnet where the user is wired or the nearest wireless access point. User can also set custom locations, which the system will remember. Privacy controls allow the user to control publishing of this information on a per location basis.”

Finally, we now have some public details on Communications Server “14” which we can share! There were a number of exciting announcements at VoiceCon in Orlando over the last couple of days:

- Polycom announced three new phones:

CX 500 – Low cost common area phone
CX 600 – High specification desk phone
CX 3000 – Conference Phone

These will go a long way to addressing one of the challenges of OCS 2007 R2 – low cost common area devices. Unfortunately, there is no more detail on the Polycom phones at this time.

In addition, Aastra announced two phones as well:

6725ip – feature rich desk phone with colour screen
6721ip – cost effective entry level common area / casual phone

The following excerpt from their public data sheet gives away some more details:

The other major challenge around OCS adoption has been around branch office deployments and survivability. I’m glad to say Microsoft are well on the way to addressing this – through working with partners to introduce a variety of survivable branch gateway devices.

Audiocodes, Dialogic and NET all announced new or enhanced branch gateway products to coincide with the release of Communications Server “14”, but the most exciting new for me has to be HP:

HP announced that they will be launching a “Survivable Branch Communication zl module” – what does this mean? From the demo video, a compeltely self contained survivable OCS appliance with PSTN interface available as a plug-in module for the HP 5400zl and 8400zl series switches!

This still from the video shows the module, but it’s impossible to make out too much detail. It appears to be a dual height module containing up to 2 PSTN interface cards.

This would allow a single 5406zl switch to be dropped into a small / medium sized office, provide a survivable gateway for OCS and still provide 96 network ports….

VoicCon finished with Gurdeep Singh Paul, Corporate VP of Unified Communications at Microsoft giving a keynote speech on the road ahead and W14. This was coupled with the first public demonstrations of Communications Server “14”, and specifically Communicator “14”.

What they showed was simply the tip of the iceberg and there is a whole load of new functionality coming in this next release.

This is a very exciting time to be a Microsoft Unified Communications partner, and I look forward to sharing more as and when I can.