Microsoft's marriage of easy communications

Published by: InfoWorld
Written by: Brian Chee, Oliver Rist
Date Published: October 16, 2007

We've been watching the romance develop between OCS (Office Communications Server 2007) and Exchange Server 2007 since OCS became available in beta earlier this year. When OCS finally came of age last month, we brought the mature couple together for a Hawaiian wedding.

To conduct this ceremony, Oliver donned his floral print shirt and straw hat and headed off to Honolulu and the Advanced Network Computing Lab at the University of Hawaii. There, lab director Brian Chee set up the testbed, and Microsoft flew in two capable representatives to manage the installation and run us through the new features before OCS and Exchange were joined in VoIP union.

Overall, our upbeat view of Exchange Server 2007 hasn't changed since we examined Beta 2 back in August of 2006. For both users and admins, Exchange 2007 is a good upgrade, and Service Pack 1 makes it even better (see "Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 packs plenty"). OCS has matured noticeably from our early-beta look. Blending Web and video conferencing, instant messaging, and VoIP telephony, this communications platform is very slick, but has significant back-end requirements, especially in large deployments.

Office Communications Server 2007
There’s an element of confusion surrounding exactly how Exchange 2007 and OCS play together -- who brings what to the sandbox. Exchange boasts several new features under its Unified Messaging banner, and OCS waves flags like IM, Web conferencing, and enterprise VoIP. There’s some overlap, so let’s get that out of the way.

Exchange 2007’s Unified Messaging capabilities revolve around the term “anywhere access.” Have a Web connection? Exchange can serve up the OWA (Outlook Web Access) works with a dollop of sour cream. Have a cell phone? Exchange can connect you to your Exchange data via mobile Web or as a direct client. Stuck with an ordinary phone? Exchange can read your e-mail to you in an electronic voice. On the flip side, your inbox can pretty much suck in anything anyone is likely to send you save for snail mail and IMs. E-mail, voice mail, video mail, faxes… Exchange can handle it all, and serve it up to Outlook or Office Communicator (the OCS client) or their mobile equivalents. Naturally, with the exception of e-mail, Exchange is just the target, not the source. Voice mail requires appropriate PBX connectivity as does fax reception. That’s where OCS comes in.

Provided your Exchange 2007 server farm includes at least one server running the Unified Messaging role, Exchange can serve as the voicemail repository for OCS users. Otherwise, Exchange’s features and functions remain the same whether OCS is a neighbor or not -- a good thing considering Exchange administrators moving to Exchange 2007 have enough to worry about.

Office Communications Server 2007 serves up everything you’ve come to expect from Live Communications Server 2005 and takes it to that logical conclusion we all wished Redmond had gotten to earlier. The succinct list of new features and improvements goes like this: VoIP telephony (with a caveat or two), group IM, in-house Web conferencing (as opposed to hosted Live Meeting), better presence management (meaning more presencing options, and more control over who can contact you and when), new federation features (for connecting with external OCS and IM networks), better support for audio and video, enterprise-class management features, and support for a Star Trek-like addition to your conference room called RoundTable. Compared to LCS 2005, you'll also find significant differences in OCS 2007’s deployment architecture.

Exchange Server 2007
Since our test of the Exchange 2007 beta last August, we’ve encountered the new e-mail platform in the course of several other tests, sometimes with mixed results. During this period, Exchange went from beta 2 all the way to shipping code and now has a service pack pecking its way to final release.

One key point from the beta preview bears repeating: Exchange 2007 is a big change from Exchange 2003. Deploying Exchange 2007 will make your mail server management life easier in the long run, but it will have short-term impacts on your physical server budget, the number of servers in your racks, your day-to-day management tools, and even the way your users access their messaging and scheduling data. You’ll have better security, better redundancy, easier management overall, but even experienced Exchange administrators will have to learn new ways of doing things. Furthermore, if you buy into several critical new capabilities, you will probably need to run more ins+-tances of the server to support the same number of users, and that means more points of potential failure. For example, Exchange 2007 gives Windows Mobile smartphones full network citizenship, with their own mail accounts, which can add a whole new dimension of desktop management headaches if you’re not careful.