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Microsoft Communications Server “14” news announced at VoiceCon

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Lots of useful information announced from the Communications Server product team at VoiceCon in Orlando has been released:

Name change

Microsoft Office Communications Server has been renamed to Microsoft Communications Server. Final naming is still being determined so for now it is code named Communications Server “14”.

 

What are some new Communicator14 client features?

New Communicator14 client allows for rich capabilities such as:

 

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More social networking features - Rich photos, real time status updates

 

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Ability to have keyword search on skills/specialty within your organization

 

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Activity feeds – similar to other social networking feeds like Facebook

 

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Selectable OCS devices such as headset vs. USB phone, etc. which is nice if you have multiple UC endpoints connected. Swappable during conversation.

 

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Simultaneous ring other devices (cell phone) based per user or caller ID lookup.

 

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Contextual calling – can type in context prior to the call so the recipient can have context about the incoming call

 

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Location awareness – based on subnet or custom location – tied to E911 location awareness

 

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Listen to voicemails right from client

 

When is CS14 shipping?

CS14 slated to be released by the end of this calendar year

 

Is there a deep dive of CS14 voice features I can review?

Yes, there is a sample CS14 IP Telephony RFP response released today at VoiceCon that you can refer to here

What are some of the new voice features of CS14?:

Enhanced 9-1-1

Call Admission Control

Call Park

Malicious Call Trace

3rd party Survivable Branch Appliances

 

 

New 3rd party partnerships announced for CS:

Common area, desktop, and conference room IP phones optimized for Microsoft Communicator “14”

Aastra
Polycom

Call Accounting and Recording

Nice Systems
Quest

Survivable Branch Appliances that provide local telephony services in the event of a wide area network failure

AudioCodes
Dialogic
Ferrari electronic AG
HP
NET

Enhanced 9-1-1 call routing services

911 Enable
Intrado

Contact Center

Aspect

 

We will post more as more CS14 information is released.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thrilling features! Come join us at MCS Forum Expo! Cheers, TC

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    There are a couple of ways to accomplish that with the currently released products. You can use either Exchange 2010 Autoatendants - has speech recognition along with directory lookup ("What name would you like to find?") or OCS Response Groups - also has speech recognition ("Say John to be routed to John, Say Sally to be routed to Sally, etc"). There is also Speech Server, which is a part of OCS, which allows you to create custom IVR/voice applications with the Speech Server SDK.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Mr. Wallis, Stay tuned to the blog. All I can say for now is Mac customers will be quite happy with the CS14 changes.

  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2010
    Please please please can they develop a useful cross platform client this time around, perhaps (worst case) put it on top of Silverlight if it will also work on Moonlight for Linux. The Mac client is terrible, has key features missing (Enterprise Voice, desktop sharing source, file transfer) and is unreliable. The web client is even more lacking. I am a huge fan of OCS/Communicator but the lack of decent cross platform support is my biggest hurdle in day to day life supporting the system.

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2010
    Guys, excuse the ignorance but I'm trying to ascertain whether OCS / MCS14 does Voice Dialing - ie: user calls a certain number, is asked what name, system does recognition and then routes call to correct user (service currently provided by a Telephonetics system)