Dare we say it may succeed?

With the release of Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, Microsoft is aspiring to become a central player in the unified communications (UC) market space. And it may very well succeed. Unlike its traditional modus operandi of blindly developing solutions it thinks the market needs – and then expecting third parties to comply with ‘the Microsoft way` – it looks as though the software giant has grown up in some respects.

During the development cycle of OCS, Chris Caposella, head of all things related to the Information Worker division at Microsoft, claims that the company teamed up with the more prominent and established vendors in the unified communications space and worked closely with them to build a solution that complements what`s already available. This, he says, means that customers can finally “build a best-of-breed unified communications infrastructure”, picking the best solutions to handle the different elements of their communications environment. Some things never change, though. Microsoft will be at the core of that ecosystem with OCS; all of the aforementioned niceties can only take place if the customer is running Exchange and Active Directory on their back-end.