Microsoft's Office Communications Service (OCS) delivers streamlined communications to your organization's users, enabling them to find and communicate with the right person, right now, right from their desktops.  OCS provides all your business-critical IP communications needs into one easy-to-use bundled service, including Presence, Web conferencing, and business-class Instant Messaging.

• Presence provides real-time status of employees (based on calendar information, login/activity status, and user preference) to be displayed across the organization and/or to selected colleagues to enable users to contact the right person the first time, using the best communications method.
• Web conferencing provides a virtual meeting experience that integrates data, content, video, voice, media, and text to enable real-time communication and collaboration whenever you need it. 
• Enterprise instant messaging enables instant messaging with the security, manageability, and reliability required for business communications.

Employees can access OCS features with Microsoft's Office Communicator client software (included with the service) as well as with a web-based client, allowing them to:

• With one click share their desktop with colleagues, and share and edit documents in real time
• Invite customer and partners via the web to a sharing session hosted by the employee
• Schedule an audio call with Outlook and manage it through the Communicator conversation window
• Have a video conversation with colleagues in high resolution

More Information

OCS is an ideal complement to your Hosted Exchange Service, enabling your users to have a unified online address book for email, instant messaging, and web conferencing.  And employees can immediately see whom within their organization is online, available to chat via IM, or in a meeting based on the recipient's Exchange calendar and log-in information.

OCS enables users to communicate in whatever method meets the needs of the moment.  For example, a communication might start with a simple IM, then migrate to voice, desktop sharing, a web conference, or to transfer files from one user to another. With Office Communicator 2007 you can easily transition to various modes of collaboration without opening new windows or starting another program.

Office Communicator's Meet Now option lets users quickly start a new conference and invite people who are either inside or outside their organization.  With the Meet Now option, you can start a new conference, and then use one of two options to invite people: You can use the Invite a Contact option to invite contacts from within your organization  Or you can use the Invite by Email option to send out an e-mail invitation, which creates an Outlook e-mail message that contains links to the conference. The recipient can join the conference by using their Web browser.

OCS provides a streamlined communications experience and offers easy connectivity for users no matter where they are or what communications method they choose. With rich presence awareness, software-powered voice capabilities, business-class IM, multi-party audio, and video and desktop sharing, you can connect and collaborate from any location that has Internet connectivity. 

Resources

• OCS R2 Overview Presentation