For a Demo on the benefits

We look at the new facilities available and the position of this new product in relation to all the other collaboration software from Microsoft.

Office Communicator is another collaboration tool in the growing suite of software components from Microsoft that deliver collaboration functionality. If you want to get a full set of collaboration tools, then you can already choose from Exchange 2003, Live Communications Server 2005, Live Meeting 2003, NetMeeting 3 (which is included in Windows 2003), SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and Windows SharePoint Services 2003. Now we have Office Communicator, which adds substantial functionality around instant messaging and presence.

Quite where the Groove Networks technology that Microsoft has recently acquired fits into this set of tools is yet to be announced.

The technology
The user interface for Office Communicator provides a panel which lists colleagues (potentially both inside your organisation and outside) and the names can be grouped to provide sections based on, for example, the different projects you are working on. The panel identifies presence through icons which show status such as available, away, do not disturb, offline, and so on. Individuals can also customise messages that can be viewed directly from this panel and also display Microsoft Outlook 'out of office' messages automatically. As well as identifying the presence of individuals in your own network, Microsoft provides connectors so that you can determine the presence of individuals using instant messaging (IM) from AOL, Yahoo! and MSN.

The software delivers voice over IP (VoIP) and can connect directly into a PSTN gateway, which allows seamless use of VoIP and the public telephone network. This means that, for example, once you have initiated an IM session, you can add new participants or convert it directly into a voice conference using VoIP.

If you want to use the public network for some or all of the participants then the server will directly call each person automatically on their preferred method of communication (such as office phone, home phone, mobile or VoIP). You can also initiate a LiveMeeting session automatically, potentially in parallel with a VoIP or PSTN-based teleconference (LiveMeeting is the hosted web conferencing tool acquired from Placeware). In both cases, the process is completely automatic, and does not need to be set up manually.

Office Communicator is available from within SharePoint Portal Server. One additional feature is that the act of loading a document from a shared workplace will automatically give you instant access to all the members of the workplace. A dropdown menu from Outlook gives you full access to the Office Communicator functionality.