If you like FREE and want to experiment with unified communications products in a virtual online environment, then you've come to the right place. Check out the newest Unfied Communications TechNet Virtual labs covering the following topics: deploying...

The Office Communications Server Public Beta has now been enhanced by product offerings from Unified Communications Group’s strategic gateway partners. After IT Pros download the Public Beta, they will be directed to the Strategic Hardware Partners Resource...

In November 2009 Cisco Mail was introduced to the world, but yesterday Cisco announced that they were abandoning this hosted mail service. It should come as no surprise that we have been watching the coverage with some interest and have some thoughts...

Hello. I’m Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate Vice President for the Unified Communications Group and I want to welcome you to the new UCG Team Blog. We’re glad that you have taken the time to come visit today and hope you will do so again in the future to...

The Office Communications Group recently published a video case study which focuses on a CEBP (Communication Enabled Business Process) implementation in which Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS) plays a critical role saving patients’ lives...

In advance of Lotusphere, IBM is touting a big cloud win with Panasonic who they claim will be using LotusLive for 380,000 people, and IBM is claiming this as a replacement of Microsoft Exchange. These claims around Panasonic compel me to shed some light...

Are you excited about devices? If so, please check out the next generation of phones and devices we announced today with our partners optimized for Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007. We’re encouraging customers to test...

Licensing Communications Server “14” Voice and Conferencing It has been a busy spring! We provided a first look at Communications Server “14” capabilities at VoiceCon Orlando, published a Microsoft response to the associated...

It’s great to see the high interest with which partners, customers, and even competitors are anticipating the launch of Communications Server “14.” Thousands of people in our early Technology Adopter Program, or TAP, already rely on...

We frequently talk about the communications industry being at a crossroads, and when I look at the lineup of keynote speakers at next week’s VoiceCon 2007 – all software companies – it’s apparent where we are headed. But what does it mean that voice...

At Interop Las Vegas 2007, Microsoft Corp and 9 leading IP-PBX vendors announced plans to provide interoperability between their respective communications solutions; this represents more than 80% of the global PBX installed base. These industry leaders...

We have created two new Blogs for Office Communications Server and Office Communicator . These Blogs are by the respective teams within the Unified Communications Group. Please add them to your RSS or favorites. The URL's are http://www.communicationsserverteam...

It’s the beginning of July and that can mean only one thing – the Lync team is heading east to connect with our partners at the 2012 Worldwide Partner Conference, in Toronto, ON! WPC is the annual partner event to celebrate our joint successes...

Great news from the Unified Communications Group and the Exchange Product Team. Exchange 2007 SP1 Beta 2 has been released as a commuity technology preview for subscribers of MSDN and TechNet Plus . To learn more about it, please check out the Exchange...

The Release Candidate for Microsoft Lync became available yesterday for customers and partners to download and try. This is a significant milestone along with the unveiling of the new nam e, and we are very pleased with the customer, partner, press and...

Some great news from the Unified Communications Group. Exchange is now offering a FREE trial of Exchange 2007. This free trial service enables enterprise customers to experience Microsoft ® Exchange Server 2007, the industry’s leading platform for...

Enterprise mobility is top of mind for a lot of IT leaders at companies everywhere. Considering the trend, it’s no surprise that the Lync team continued to receive feedback on a great webcast covering Lync for mobile . In response to questions across...

This is just the first of a series of posts regarding performance of Live Communications Server. Performance is a complex topic, so I thought I would step back and describe some of the basic principles behind what we do in the product group to analyze...

Today, at Tech∙Ed in Berlin we announced that Exchange 2010 is available. This version of Exchange is like no other for many reasons. One reason is that we built it as a service from the beginning, and over two years ago it became the e-mail service for...

In this blog post, I want to talk about how, when nature disrupts our lives, technology can help us keep things going. A couple of years ago in Seattle, where I live, our city shut down when it was hit by a powerful snowstorm. Because I had Office Communicator...

We are announcing today that Polycom has signed a multi-year agreement with Microsoft, becoming one of our strategic partners to offer integrated solutions in the Unified Communications space . Our goal is to deliver products to help our customers improve...

Last Wednesday I posted that we'd released Lync to manufacturing, meaning our code is locked and the product is ready. We received some great questions as a result, so I wanted to address a few of them here. First, there are still a few more steps...

This week I'd like to talk about LA Fitness and its Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (now called Lync Server 2010 with the latest release) solution. As LA Fitness has continued to open sports clubs all over the US and Canada, it ended up...

Keeping your email up and running is mission critical. While other business applications can go down without much notice, when email is down for even a minute everyone in the organization notices and wants answers. As such, Exchange admins have long had...

Some great news today as Tellme Networks has officially joined the Microsoft family. On May 3 rd , Microsoft announced that it has completed its acquisition of Tellme, the Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of voice services for everyday life, including...