Is Office Communications Server a PBX?
I hear this question all the time from customers. It's a fair question and a natural one since enterprise telephony has long been the province of the PBX manufacturers. In fact, this was such an entrenched mind set that most of the enterprise VoIP products out there today are just the same PBX architecture that's always been there with an extra interface to support VoIP. It's the same old dog with a shiny new collar. To answer this question, I usually pose a few of my own:
- Why would you pay good money to replace something you already have? That is, replace one TDM PBX with a new "VoIP" PBX
- Why would Microsoft bother releasing a product in 2007 that did nothing more than a product from the early '80s?
- Have your communication needs changed at all since 1876?
Office Communications Server is not a PBX. It's a product to teach that old dog some new tricks and give you a genuine return on your investment at the same time. It's also part of a genuine Unified Communications strategy. By that I don't mean re-branding your existing PBX product line with a UC name. Times have changed and so have customer's needs including web and video conferencing. OCS is the product to deliver a new 21st century experience around telephony and other modes of communication as well. This doesn't mean you have to throw out that PBX. It works and provides a good basic service. Complement that PBX with OCS and now you have: people-centric communication, instant messaging, rich presence information, application sharing, video conferencing, and more. Add in Exchange Unified Messaging and you have a 21st century voicemail experience as well.
Will OCS ever be a PBX? Probably not. I think we are reaching the end of an era for the PBX architecture (whether TDM-based or IP-based). It's time to think about a new era of Unified Communications. Time to think about people as people rather than as phone numbers. Time to replace phone tag with something more productive. Time to introduce new ways of leveraging voice in your business applications and removing this island of telephony. Time to stop paying for a PC but only getting a phone ;-)
What do you think?
Happy Holidays!
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About Sean Olson
Sean Olson is the Group Program Manager for the Office Communications Server product at Microsoft. His team is responsible for all engineering aspects of conferencing, instant messaging, presence, and voice within the server product. He has over 10 years experience in the area of real time communications and voice over IP and is an industry expert in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standardized by the IETF. Since joining Microsoft in 2002, he has delivered five releases of the Office Communications Server product line working on everything from protocols, to security, to performance.
