BetaNews Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Enters Public Beta

Category Soft, Vista, Education | Permalink | 27. March 2007

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OCS 2007 is an incredibly broad update that contains a wide range of new and enhanced capabilities well beyond what was available in LCS 2005. This tidbit below from BetaNews on GRUU is an example of an important function but one that does not make the list of major changes outlined in most media reports. IT groups need to establish a thorough process for evaluating and assessing OCS 2007.

ZDNet has a nice video interview with Patrick Duffy (Group Product Manager). There’s also a good collection of screen shots.

Some Microsoft links: The UC Group blog post on the beta release and the UC Group blog post on the PBX interoperability specification.

I’ve completed a 50 page report on OCS 2007 that will come out in several weeks (along with a 30 page companion report that documents the current LCS 2005 platform). For Burton Group clients, if you are interested in discussing the upcoming report on OCS 2007, just follow normal procedures for setting up an inquiry. Are you already planning to deploy OCS 2007? If so, I would love to discuss how Microsoft fits into your UC strategy.

Among the technologies these two are sharing is the GRUU protocol, which creates a tag at the end of the old SIP identifier (which was essentially a glorified e-mail address) that routers such as Cisco’s won’t block, but which will lead directly to specific endpoint applications on the client side.
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Just three weeks ago, Cisco issued a new draft of its proposed GRUU to the IETF. One example of a GRUU that Cisco supplies is this: sip:alice@example.com;gr=kjh29×97us97d. Here, the original SIP protocol address continues to identify what the IETF calls the agent of record (AOR). To this, Cisco appends a semicolon and a gr= parameter, which appears to be a kind of pseudo-random string determined by what the draft calls “the registrar in the domain.” You could probably cross that out and enter “Active Directory” instead

Source: BetaNews | Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Enters Public Beta

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