OCS

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 - I went and did a three day jumpstart course on this the other day. The instructor was Dan Pracny-strass who worked for DDLS. Anyway I really enjoyed the course - it was only a small class which meant I could ask more questions :)

IMHO OCS will be big - but it will take a while to build up steam. The main problems are that it needs a LOT of servers and they don't recommend sharing roles - so an entry level solution is six servers. The whole thing ran ok in VM's for the lab and we have experimented with this kind of setup (using virtual machines) for a businesses that wanted this product but could not justify so many servers.

One of the main things I liked was the RTaudio and RT video codecs - whilst the fact they had used proprietary codecs could generally be considered a negative this was made up for by how well they worked. The part that I liked most was how it was both secure and adaptive to low bandwith or bad connections but could scale up the other way to give better audio if there is a lot of bandwith. The idea is instead of spending a whole lot of money on implementing QoS and Wan links you can just use normal internet connections and the codec is secure and adapts its bit rate to suit the conditions.

The ideal scenario of course is the communicator to communicator calls.