Microsoft&#39;s Biz IM Server Goes Gold
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After nearly six months of beta testing, Microsoft&#39;s Office Live Communications Server 2005 is ready for prime time. The next iteration of Redmond&#39;s enterprise instant messaging product was released to manufacturers
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InfoWorld - Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it will acquire a Chicago-based provider of enterprise group chat software to bolster the messaging capabilities of its Office Communications Server and Office Communicator products.
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Software maker is ready with a test version of its server software for running business phone systems.
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Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled the 2004 version of its Host Integration Server (HIS) product, which is designed to integrate IBM mainframes and servers with Windows systems.
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Firm shoots for power users among Hotmail crowd, marking first time an Office component is available as subscription service.
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The popular IM consolidation service adds audio and video chat.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is adding capabilities for RFID and EDI to its BizTalk Server business process management platform as well as making BizTalk friendlier for application developers. Being released Monday, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 adds a device abstraction layer enabling it to record information from RFID systems. Relevant RFID reads are connected to core supply chain processes or enterprise applications. Business rules can be applied to the data coming from the RFID readers. "This is the first time that we've shipped any RFID technology from Microsoft," Burley Kawasaki, director in the Microsoft Connected Systems Division, said. BizTalk Server enables exchanging of business processes. "It's all about connecting your systems regardless of the age, protocol, or vendor," Kawasaki said. Microsoft is maintaining the BizTalk Server 2006 nomenclature in the upgrade to send the message that upgrading is easy, according to Kawasaki. Also featured in R2 is out-of-the-box support for business-to-business integration standards, including EDI, the HIPAA and HL7 standards for health care, and SWIFT for financial trading. Pre-built classes and schemas are featured with users able to integrate BizTalk Server with partners' systems compliant with these standards. Real-time visibility is provided into supply chain operations. "With the R2 release, we're including these [standards] just out-of-the-box," said Kawasaki. Adding EDI support helps users, an analyst said. "One of the big [features in the release] is the increased EDI capability, which customers will now be able to get from a single vendor instead of having to go to multiple vendors," said Ken Vollmer, principal analyst at Forrester. "I think that's a smart move." EDI basically runs industries like retail and health care, Vollmer said. For developers, Microsoft is linking parts of the .Net Framework -- the ECF (Windows Communication Foundation) and Windows Workflow Foundation -- to BizTalk Server, enabling developers to develop composite applications, such as a front-end system that brings data from multiple back-end systems. "Probably the most notable part of R2 is that it provides seven adapters and wizards that enable easy communication to and from BizTalk Server and Web services-based applications via WCF," Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink, said. "This means that they are pulling it into their Web services infrastructure and unifying a larger part of their platform." With the product introduction, Microsoft is releasing BizTalk Server Branch Edition, which creates a hub-and-spokes model in which a branch location can automate event collection in real-time and send key information back to the central BizTalk Server hub. Also part of the rollout is a Beta 2 of the planned BizTalk Server Adapter Pack. This serves as an abbreviated version of BizTalk Server providing for point-to-point integration between applications. Initial systems supported are SAP and Siebel applications as well as the Oracle database. Adapters are scheduled to be available in the first half of 2008. In the interoperability space, Microsoft is bolstering interoperability with mainframe and IBM AS/400 midrange systems by including capabilities of the company's Host Integration Server software within BizTalk Server. Host Integration Server is being discontinued as a separate product. "You now get that capability as part of BizTalk Server," Kawasaki said. Microsoft also is releasing version 1 of its Enterprise Service Bus Guidance manual. "Our customers have been using BizTalk and .Net for many years to build ESB architectures," Kawasaki said. The free manual features pre-built code as well as guidance, patterns and practices. It can be downloaded off the company's CodePlex site. While some companies like Progress Sonic view an ESB as a specific product category, Microsoft sees ESB as an architectural model for connecting systems together using a bus. The Enterprise Edition of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is priced at $34,999 per processor. The Branch Edition costs $1,799 per processor.
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With Microsoft's new Live Communications Server 2005 due out in December, enterprise IM users and vendors are eyeing new opportunities for more secure messaging in the workplace.
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The next version of Microsoft Corp.&#39;s enterprise instant messaging and presence server will be available on Dec. 1, the company said late on Monday.
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The increasingly competitive Web mail market has a new player: Instant messaging provider ICQ. The company now offers a fee-based service that includes 2GB of storage, a calendar feature, task manager, notepad
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Microsoft Corp.&#039;s latest instant messaging program is ready for prime time, the company said Monday.
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On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled the 2004 version of its Host Integration Server (HIS) product, which is designed to integrate IBM mainframes and servers with Windows systems.
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Two months after the heavily hyped release of Microsoft&#39;s Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), the company has exceeded its delivery projections for individual users and small businesses.
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While Microsoft&#39;s Live Communications Server (LCS) is first and foremost an enterprise instant-messaging server, Microsoft is expected to position its 2005 version as its entrÃ©e into the telephony market.
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A Microsoft partner has become the first to offer Microsoft&#39;s new unified communications software as a hosted service.Intermedia on Tuesday will begin offering Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as a hosted service on a subscription basis for $7.95 per user, per month, said Rurik Bradbury, vice president of strategy for Intermedia. The service initially will be available to users of Intermedia&#39;s hosted Exchange service, which costs $12 per user, per month. Eventually, the OCS service will be available independently of that service, he said.Intermedia is a SaaS (software as a service) provider in New York and one of Microsoft&#39;s hosting partners. Microsoft also offers Exchange as a hosted service, and eventually plans to offer OCS as a hosted service, but has not specified when. Other Microsoft hosting partners such as USA.net and Apptix also plan to offer OCS on a hosted basis but have not done so thus far.The company is already hosting OCS for some early adopter customers, but the general rollout of the service starts Tuesday, Bradbury said. The service is aimed at SMBs that find it too complicated to install all the software on premise and administer and manage it themselves.&quot;If you think Exchange is difficult to set up for a small business, think about setting up Exchange and OCS,&quot; Bradbury said. &quot;It&#39;s an absolute nightmare for SMBs to do this.&quot;Included in the hosted OCS offering will be private, secure instant messaging and message archiving -- the latter of which is a legal requirement for companies that deal with sensitive information, such as financial services and health care, Bradbury said. The service also offers Web presence integration across Office Communicator, Outlook, and SharePoint, so a user&#39;s free/busy status is available to colleagues across all those services, and PC-to-PC voice and video conferencing.One feature of OCS that isn&#39;t in the first version of the hosted service is integration with a company&#39;s PBX (private branch exchange), but that will be available in a future version, he added.Microsoft launched OCS in October&#160;as the hub of its unified communications strategy, which aims to run a company&#39;s e-mail, instant-messaging, Web-conferencing, videoconferencing, and IP-based telephony services on one software infrastructure. Microsoft and other software providers, such as IBM, as well as traditional networking providers, such as Cisco, are competing in this new convergence space, which used to be primarily the domain of telecommunications providers.Intermedia plans to host its OCS service out of its datacenters in California, where it has three: one in Milpitas, one in San Jose and one in Sunnyvale. The company also has a datacenter in New York.
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Users will be able to receive news alerts and information via IM.
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MSN Messenger, Microsoft&#39;s instant message service, is back up and running this morning after a routine maintenance operation went wrong, rendering the service sporadically unavailable for three days.