Office Communicator - the next collaboration tool from Microsoft

By Christopher Harris-Jones

Microsoft will be launching Office Communicator later this year. This is the latest component in Microsoft's collaboration software strategy and it adds significant functionality (and complexity) to the set of tools already available. Chris Harris-Jones looks at the new facilities available and the position of this new product in relation to all the other collaboration software from Microsoft.

Yet another collaboration tool

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. The software is currently in beta and will be generally available in June 2005.

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

The technology

Office Communicator has been much trailed under the codename of 'Istanbul'. It is not as comprehensive as was originally planned, but nevertheless does provide some impressive functionality.

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.

If you wish to execute application sharing, then you can automatically initiate a NetMeeting session (which is the Microsoft collaboration tool that delivers video and audio conferencing, white-boarding, desktop sharing and various other collaboration facilities).

Unfortunately, the functionality of LiveMeeting and NetMeeting has not yet been integrated despite the substantial overlap in the business requirements for the two packages. At present, LiveMeeting remains a broadcast-only tool; it is necessary to use NetMeeting for fully interactive meetings. Another integration issue is that there are separate chat facilities in LiveMeeting and Office Communicator.

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.

The big picture

Microsoft does seem to have an increasingly integrated strategy for collaboration. The high-level story is very sound and seems to be offering what the end user needs to work effectively in a collaborative environment. The software tools provide a comprehensive range of functions; indeed, many of the functions are actually duplicated in various products which makes life even more complex. Challenges arise when you need an integrated solution - the sheer number of products from different groups in Microsoft instantly complicates the picture hugely. These problems arise largely because of the way that Microsoft is organised into multiple groups around products rather than around the collaboration vision.

While Microsoft will undoubtedly continue to play a leading role in the collaboration software world, it will suffer when compared with other players in this market, such as Oracle and IBM. Both of these organisations have simple coherent messages for the collaboration tools they deliver, even though the functionality is actually provided by multiple pieces of software underneath the covers in both cases.

Chris Harris-Jones is a Principal Analyst within Ovum's Technology Group, and plays a leading role in Information Management Technologies as both an analyst and consultant. He can be contacted directly at christopher.harris-jones@ovum.com.