Microsoft Mixes Exchange and Real-Time Communications

February 2, 2006
By Dan Muse

Citing what it describes as "the mission critical nature of e-mail and the rapidly increasing use of instant messaging, VoIP, audio/video/Web conferencing," Microsoft earlier this week announced that it is merging its Exchange and Real-Time Collaboration Groups to form the Unified Communications Group.

Anoop Gupta, current corporate vice president of the RTC group, will head up the new business unit. "Exchange and RTC have existed as separate organizational entities at Microsoft, [but] these groups have a great record of collaborating to ensure people who are trying to communicate across these various technologies can do it effectively," Gupta said on Microsoft's Web site.

While the products will now be offered under one banner, Exchange, Live Communications Server, and other offerings will continue to be available as separate products. "This announcement does not affect the timing or the feature sets for the next generation of products currently under development," Gupta said.

Not surprisingly VoIP will plays a key role in Microsoft’s unified communication plans. "Just as we have driven innovation around e=mail and IM, we will deliver innovation with VoIP and introduce important new usage scenarios for business voice applications," Gupta said. "Businesses should take a close look at their current and planned telephony investments and rationalize that with their PC communications investments.

The focus on unified communications precedes the release of Exchange 12, which is scheduled to ship in late 2006 or early 2007. Unified messaging is expected to be a key feature in 64-bit version of Microsoft messaging platform.

"Although unified messaging products have been available for several years, Microsoft is taking a new approach by including these features with Exchange 12 at no additional charge," writes Sara Radicati in the Radicati's Group Messaging Technology Report.

Radicati describes the unified messaging interface as one of the most impressive features of Exchange 12. Called Outlook Voice Access, Radicati reports that the automated attendant "acts like a virtual personal assistant."

Another key feature, according to the Radicati Group, is Exchange 12's Role-Based Architecture, which allows it to play one of several roles in a message infrastructure. For example, it function as an edge server, hub server, unified messaging server, client access server or mail box server.

Source: http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/enterprise/article.php/3582571