Call Center Software

The highly anticipated Microsoft (News - Alert) Office Communications Server 2010 is set to release for the last calendar quarter of 2010, but rumors in the industry had the company promising a beta version for testers by the end of March, as captured in this ZDnet blog.

 

That projected date appears to be nothing more than optimistic -- and even Microsoft is refuting the rumors, claiming it hasn’t even confirmed the name of the latest release.

Other sources on the Web indicated the beta version of Microsoft’s Unified Communications (News - Alert) suite might be ready by early April – but based on the response from Microsoft, one can only wonder.

Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) is the company’s unified instant messaging/VoIP/conferencing product. Communicator acts as the client for the OCS.

The software giant had announced its plans to show off the Communicator 2010 at the UC Expo conference in England in mid-March, but this information has been removed from the conference website, leaving industry players wondering on next steps.

 

According to the conference website, the Microsoft session would be the first outside of the U.S. for the next-generation Communicator client and two weeks before the official public beta launch.

Company officials said the industry should expect the new OCS release to be tightly integrated with Exchange Server 2010, in addition to the Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation.

Reportedly there are several new related software development kits and newly exposed programming interfaces in development for the OCS release that are expected to make it easier for both developers and customers to customize and maximize the experience through presence, telephone and other built-in OCS features.

The “Wave 14,” according to a post in Neowin, includes Exchange Server 2010, Office 2010, Sharepoint Server 2010 and Office Communications Server 2010. Communicator and Office Communications Server provide instant message and audio conferencing capability within organizations.

 

The Enterprise edition will support video conferencing and real-time collaboration. In addition, Communications Server can be extended to integrate with public instant messaging services, including Microsoft’s Live Messenger service, while also allowing administrators the ability to log and filter their traffic.

The latest Microsoft version of this solution is currently the OCS 2007 R2, which was released in December of 2008. Microsoft still has not made it clear whether it will release a preview of Office Communications Server 2010 around the same time as the Communicator 2010 beta.