Smarter Messaging [Mike Jones, UK]

I’ve been giving some thought recently to the decisions that companies who don’t “follow the Microsoft way” are faced with when they decide to run a collaboration project. It’s so easy (or complex depending on your knowledge) to follow the Office, Sharepoint, Live Communications Server (LCS), Exchange route in terms of knowing that you are buying into a suite that are designed to work together and add value to each other. A Microsoft employee that I was talking to a few weeks ago said “I can’t imagine what LCS must be like without Sharepoint, because it just makes it so much more valueable and useful”.

So here’s a rough list of the value you get from LCS standalone and then with the various items from the eco-system added in:

Live Communications Server:

• Internal Instant Message and Voice communication
• Presence Status
• “On the road” users connecting without VPN

With Exchange:

• Integrated free/busy status
• Automatic Out-of-Office information in Office Communicator (MOC)

With Office 2003 (or XP with service packs):

• Integrated Presence into Office comments

With Sharepoint:

• Integrated Presence in dashboards/portals

With SIP Gateways/correct hardware:

• PBX integration
• Call transfer

As you can see there’s a lot of goodies available to you with LCS playing host in the centre, but there’s a lot of dependancies.