Well, Microsoft has done it again. As if the office and OS market wasn’t dominated enough, they are reaching their poor QA, security-exploited, wretched fingers into the voice market. Yes, I’m not much of a Microsoft fan. They have their place in the workplace, but it’s a small niche 
Anyway, Office Communications Server 2007 has been released for purchase. Microsoft states that while it will complement your existing PBX today, it CAN standalone, as a seperate PBX by itself. I do not know what strides they’ve made for call centers, but if OCS doesn’t have it, it soon will.
First off, MS built OCS to use SIP. To me, that was a mistake right there. SIP does have it’s place, but not as the foundation for your voice calls. It’s up to the vendor to create their own implementation of SIP features, which means…. YEP…. another proprietary system, locked in by the ever-loving Microsoft Gods. 
Okay… I am exaggerating there a bit, as it may not be 100% proprietary, but they should have just gone with H.323.
I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a Cisco bigot, so I’m going to tell you to purchase Cisco Call Manager. But, if you don’t like Cisco, go with Avaya, or even Asterisk, if you feel up to the challenge. But, please don’t trust Microsoft to your phone system. I mean, the phone system is the last legacy technology that users still know will never fail. Give it to Microsoft, and you’ll be rebooting weekly…….
UPDATE: Sorry for not providing the story link.
