Office Communications Server 2007 delivers streamlined communications for your users so they can find and communicate with the right person, right now, from the applications they use most.

Instant Messaging

Instant messaging (IM) is a quick and convenient way for users to send text messages to other users in real time over the internet. OCS automatically encrypts IM text for added security.

Presence

A core capability of OCS is presence–the ability to detect another user’s availability on the network. Using OCS, users can display their presence availability status—for example, Available, Busy, Away, Do Not Disturb or Offline—to let others know their availability to be contacted. Presence information can also display other contact information such as a person's phone number.
To easily monitor the presence information of another user, users can add other users to their Contact List and can organize and group these contacts in different ways (by department, for example). Users may also search their company’s address book to find other users—which means it is not necessary to add someone to the Contact List in order to detect presence or send an instant message.
Displaying presence information requires that OCS R2 be installed on client systems.

Presence Integration with Microsoft Office

OCS integrates presence with Microsoft Office 2007 SP1 or later programs. This feature enables users to instantly find and communicate with people while working with familiar applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Word, and Microsoft Office SharePoint.
A colored presence button that represents a person’s presence status lets users instantly see who is online and available to discuss documents or upcoming meetings, regardless of time zone or location.
For organizations using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging services, presence information can also display a person’s schedule based on their Outlook calendar. This makes it easy to determine when someone will be available to communicate.

Audio/Video Communication

The OCS service delivers person-to-person (1:1) audio and video conversations for users equipped with a headset device and web camera. Conversation quality may vary depending on customer network performance.

Remote Access

The OCS service gives users the ability to connect directly to the service over the Internet, without users connecting to their corporate network through a Remote Access Service (RAS) or virtual private network (VPN).

Distribution Lists

Using OCS R2, users can add e-mail distribution lists to their Contact Lists. Instant messages may be sent to individual members of a distribution list or the entire distribution list.
Distribution lists can be expanded to see the individual members of such lists.