What is Hosted Office Communication Server?

Office Communications Server 2007 is a new hosted service that delivers streamlined communications for your company so you can find and communicate with the right person, right now, from the applications you use most. Office Communication server is the back end of our service offering which we manage and host for your company.

What is Hosted Microsoft Office Communicator 2007?

Microsoft Office Communicator is the software that your employees use to communicate with other employees or customers. What does Communicator enable me to do? Office Communicator 2007 is a unified communications client that helps employees be more productive by enabling them to communicate easily with others in different locations or time zones using a range of different communication options, including instant messaging (IM), voice, and video. Integration with programs across the 2007 Microsoft Office system — including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Groove, and SharePoint Server — gives employees many different ways to communicate with each other via a consistent and simple user experience.

Connect with others

Office Communicator 2007 provides easy access to rich presence, IM, and other real-time communications capabilities to enable employees to securely communicate with each other more easily and quickly. Rich presence capabilities enable you to share information about your availability with other contacts, and to view their availability. Office Communicator 2007 integrates presence information from multiple sources — including your calendar and out of office message — to provide better information so people know if you're available to communicate, and if so, which method would be best.

Consistent experience

Office Communicator 2007 helps to keep things simple by integrating varying modes of communication into a single user experience, centred on the person who the communication is being conducted with. A communication might start with a simple IM (Instant Message). With Office Communicator 2007 you can add other modes of communication. If voice or video would be more effective, you can add those modes without opening new windows or starting another program. Office Communicator 2007 focuses on the people in a conversation and provides a consistent experience regardless of whether the conversation is using IM, voice, video, or other modes. Office Communicator 2007 is part of the Microsoft Office system and is closely integrated with other Microsoft Office programs. This integration helps ensure that communications can occur in the context of the program being used, without having to switch to a different program for a different form of communication.

Communicate contextually

From an e-mail message received in Office Outlook 2007, users can view presence information about other users and initiate real-time communication from within the message, avoiding the need to switch applications and search for users. When working on a document in Office Word 2007, users can see a list of the people associated with the document along with availability information for those users. From this contextual list and based on this availability information, users can initiate a conversation directly with the appropriate people.