Microsoft Stakes Claim for Enterprise Collaboration

Seeking to extend its desktop dominance to include voice and video communication, Microsoft has announced a new all-in-one SIP client for PCs, code-named Istanbul, that handles voice, instant messaging and video communications.

The announcement at the Fall Voice on the Net (VON) conference in Boston, Mass., was followed by a number of partnership announcements, specifically by BroadSoft, a provider of a hosted PBX application suite, and RADVision and Polycom, providers of IP video conferencing.

The most revolutionary aspect of Istanbul is not its combination of voice, video and IM in one client, something that Yahoo! and MSN have done for some time. Rather it is its industrial-strength use of presence, through Microsoft’s Live Communication Server (LCS), that makes the product unique. More than simple notifications of the presence and availability of others, the LCS includes heavy-duty security features, such as encryption and logging of messages, plus an endless array of presence applications.

“This client, combined with the LCS, is like the relationship between Exchange and Outlook,” says Ed Simnett, product manager, Live Communications Group. “The server has the core capabilities and the client provides the end-user experience.” The difference is that the communication enabled by the LCS is not email but “real-time,” Simnett says, such as voice, video and instant messages.

Microsoft characterizes the new client as a product aimed at enterprises with large corps of “knowledge workers” who need a communication and collaboration tool right on their PCs, one that integrates with other popular Microsoft desktop applications, such as Outlook and Microsoft Office.

The new product is also based firmly on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), which is fast becoming the basis for IP communication. “All of the communications are SIP,” says Marc Sanders, senior product manager, Live Communication Server. “The LCS 2005 is using SIP,” which enables connection to other instant-message systems. AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! just announced that they will use SIP and the LCS to enable their instant-message systems to interconnect.

Microsoft takes some pains to insist that Istanbul is not intended to be a phone service. Rather, the company says, it is intended to be a communication tool that integrates with other applications that workers commonly use.

Indeed, a number of voice-over-IP companies that provide call control announced that they would integrate the new client as well as Microsoft’s LCS. This integration will bring new, complex presence and collaboration capabilities to existing voice-service products. For example, BroadSoft, which said several months ago that it intended to use the LCS to bring presence to its hosted PBX products, formalized that relationship at VON. Scott Wharton, vice president of marketing, BroadSoft, says Microsoft will not develop its own call control and voice applications, but rather will partner with “people like us, who make the telephony features, such as multiway conferencing, voice mail, etc.”

Companies such as BroadSoft add telephony presence information, Wharton says, such as whether a person is on the phone. Combined with the presence and IM capabilities of LCS, this would allow an application that, for example, could pop up an instant message rather than ring the phone if the person called is on the phone. The person called could respond via IM, or could ignore the IM or could respond with a voice message, or could even click on a link in the IM to add the caller to the ongoing call.

RADVision announced it has ported its hardware-based viaIP video conferencing product to software that will operate on Windows servers, so that it can be incorporated into a service based on the LCS. This would enable the refined video conferencing control functions of viaIP to be used on a PC with the Istanbul client.

Polycom also announced a collaboration with Microsoft that will combine the presence awareness and instant-messaging capabilities of the LCS and Windows Messenger with Polycom's ViewStation products, SoundPoint and SoundStation IP handsets and conference phones, MGC voice and video bridges, and the WebOffice conference portal.

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