http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60407816
Office Communicator shows Microsoft's eagerness to tap into voice over
IP, which Gates describes as "exploding."
By Aaron Ricadela
InformationWeek
Microsoft is bullish enough on Internet phone calls and Web meetings
that it's coming out with special Office software to support them.
At a press conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Microsoft chairman
and chief software architect Bill Gates unveiled a product, Office
Communicator 2005, and updates to two others that promise to make it
easier for workers to manage their phone calls, E-mail, and instant
messages from the same place. Office Communicator, which is due in
June, will let workers set up phone calls from Outlook; use one set of
contacts for E-mail, instant messaging, and Internet calls; and let
other users see whether they're at their desks, on the move, or
offline, and route incoming calls accordingly.
"Communicating in a better way has a huge impact for business," Gates
said. The PC, cell phone, and desktop telephone are "a triumvirate
that should work together," he said.
Microsoft is trying to leverage the market share of its Office
productivity suite and Windows operating system to head off inroads
into the growing voice-over-IP market by companies such as Avaya
Communications, Nortel Networks, Time Warner's America Online unit,
and Vonage Holdings. Office, which Gates called the "most-used
software application of all time," is evolving "way beyond what people
thought of as a single person with a spreadsheet or a word processor."
He added, "Voice over IP is exploding."
Businesspeople's collaboration should go "well beyond E-mail," to
include audio, video, and screen-sharing capabilities, Gates said. PC
users should also have one set of electronic contacts that shows up in
all the software they use. "You'll never want to think of a sales
report being on a piece of paper again," he said.
To use Office Communicator, companies will also need to buy
Microsoft's Live Communications Server 2005, which came out last fall.
At the end of this month, Microsoft plans to release an update that
will let customers license the ability to use Office Communicator or
Windows Messenger with the server to instant message with users of the
AOL, MSN, and Yahoo consumer networks. The server also includes new
capabilities to block IM spam. Office Communicator will be sold as
client-access licenses purchased with Live Communications Server,
Microsoft corporate VP Anoop Gupta said in an interview.
The company also plans to release a version of its Live Meeting
software for Web conferencing. Live Meeting 2005 includes the ability
to schedule meetings from an Outlook calendar, as well as new video
codecs for higher quality and less network bandwidth consumption. It
will be available this week as a Windows client or a version that runs
in a Web browser.
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