communications server software

Office Live Communications Server Enterprise Edition + SP1, FR, Disk Kit Live Communications Server 2005 Enterprise Edition key features:

- New in Live Communications Server 2005
- Clustering capability

Live Communications Server 2005 delivers instant messaging (IM) and presence as part of a scalable, enterprise-grade solution offering enhanced security, seamless integration with other Microsoft products, and an extensible, industry-standard development platform. Your organization can realize cost savings and improved business efficiencies, increased individual productivity, and enhanced intellectual property protection with this easy-to-manage, highly available solution.

Find and Communicate with People Instantly to Increase Productivity

Increase productivity with integrated presence and real-time communication to locate people and share information quickly.

- Instantly find and collaborate with local and remote users to share critical and time-sensitive information. Presence awareness within your desktop and line-of-business applications eliminates delays in locating and communicating with key work partners.

- Provide mobile workers with access at home or on the road. Enable remote users to access security-enhanced presence and IM solutions without requiring Virtual Private Networking (VPN).

- Collaborate with business partners and other organizations as easily as co-workers while protecting sensitive business information. By providing encrypted and optionally logged transactions between public IM data centers and Live Communications Server internal users, organizations can more securely and effectively connect information workers to the most popular public IM services (MSN, AOL, and Yahoo!).

Take Advantage of Microsoft Office System Integration

Microsoft works to ensure that customers can extend current infrastructure investments, yet have the opportunity to incorporate new technologies into existing computing environments. Live Communications Server 2005 is part of the Microsoft Windows Server System and adheres to the common engineering criteria.

- Improve the security of your collaboration infrastructure. Live Communications Server 2005 allows users to share Microsoft Office and other applications from work or home with encrypted IM and voice- and video-enhanced collaborative sessions.

- Allow users to find and communicate with people without interrupting their workflow. Real-time communication capabilities within Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Word, and other familiar Office programs indicate presence to accelerate team collaboration dramatically.

Eliminate Communication Delays with Co-Workers and Business Partners

With advanced presence technology, Live Communications Server 2005 offers instant access to team members, partners, suppliers, and customers across multiple geographies, time zones, and organizational boundaries.

- Improve business efficiency by enabling information workers to find and communicate with people in a security-enhanced enterprise-grade real-time communications environment. Live Communications Server provides presence awareness from your familiar Microsoft Office and line-of-business applications to eliminate delays in locating and communicating with co-workers and business partners.

- Get a manageable and scalable solution with seamless integration among Live Communications Server 2005, the Microsoft Office System, and the Windows Server System infrastructure.

Develop Enterprise-Grade Unified Communications Solutions

Build solutions that are integrated with your existing Microsoft infrastructure, delivering enterprise-grade security, scale, and manageability.

- Authenticate users and provide Kerberos and NT LAN Manager (NTLM) capabilities for single sign-on. Integration with Microsoft Windows Active Directory consolidates your network, server, and IM user resources to give you more security and control over your network.

- Provide a unified communications solution that can scale up as your company grows. Extend real-time communications to customers, partners, and suppliers while scaling to over 100,000 users with Enterprise Edition and approximately 15,000 users with Standard Edition.

- Increase uptime for your enterprise communications. Advanced architecture using Microsoft SQL Server offers future growth and data recovery capabilities, which guard against unscheduled downtime and data loss.

- Ensure compliance with regulatory and internal controls. Use SQL-based logging and searchable conversation logs in Live Communications Server to allow internal auditing of IM transactions.

Use Familiar and Powerful Windows-Based Management Tools

Simplify your setup, management, and administration tasks with new deployment tools and familiar, easy-to-use management interfaces.

- Get your organization up and running quickly. Take advantage of new deployment tools that simplify the introduction of enterprise-grade instant messaging into your Windows environment.

- Save time and reduce training costs by using familiar Windows graphical user interface (GUI)-based administration tools to manage users, servers, and global settings. Live Communications Server integrates with your existing Windows-based management tools including Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Microsoft Management Console (MMC), and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) to reduce server management and training requirements.

Simplify the Creation of Real-Time Applications

Presence-enable your existing applications and develop next-generation software solutions.

- Add real-time capabilities to your information gathering solutions. Separate client and server application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable innovative new applications.

- Introduce new ways of using presence enabled real-time communication. Take advantage of the vibrant partner ecosystem to complement and enhance your Live Communications Server solution.

Support for Microsoft Office Communicator 2005

Integrate rich communication to allow teams and information workers to more easily and efficiently communicate in real time.

- Search for, and easily find, contacts through integration with corporate directories.

- Interact in new, rich ways with 1:1 video and voice communication capabilities.

- Maximize reach and collaboration through integration with the corporate phone system.

- View extended presence information, including the ability to set 'custom notes' and display Microsoft Exchange Server 'Out of Office' messages directly in Microsoft Office Communicator 2005.

- Switch from a multi-party IM conversation to a public switched telephone network (PSTN)-based conference call.

Live Communications Server 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) enables you to take advantage of updates and improvements to Live Communications Server 2005.

Enhanced Federation

Federation is the ability to establish trusted relationships between your organization and one or more external organizations allowing users to initiate and share IM sessions and subscribe to user presence across network boundaries.

Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 simplifies the deployment model for the federation feature delivered in Live Communications Server 2005 by making the discovery of Live Communications Server environments (or Access Proxies) dynamic, no longer requiring static configuration. SP1 also gives network administrators the ability to limit enhanced federation for their organizations to explicitly designated external domains (the recommended configuration), or extend it to any and all external domains.

The enhanced federation of Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 uses Domain Name System Service Location (DNS SRV) resolution to locate the Live Communications Server Access Proxy of a federated organization. This enhancement, therefore, eliminates the need to specify the Access Proxy of each and every federated organization and provides the Full Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of your organization's Access Proxy to these organizations. While simplifying the process, Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 uses mutual Transport Layer Security (TLS) to secure the federated connections.

Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 offers additional administrative control over the number of incoming and outgoing connections created on an individual Access Proxy. With SP1, customers can support an increased number of Access Proxies in a single array, offering additional capacity for more federated connections.

Enhanced Security and Spam Over IM Control

Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 introduces two new filters to help protect your organization, and each enterprise-to-enterprise federated connection, from malicious attacks.

The first is an optional spam over IM (SPIM) filter that reduces unauthorized or unsolicited messages and is configurable to suit the needs of your organization.

Instant messaging and sharing presence information with users connected to public IM Internet service providers (MSN, AOL, and Yahoo!) are restricted to names explicitly specified in each user's Allow or Block list. This restriction provides additional control of unsolicited messages, or SPIM.

A new IM filter application blocks messages that contain URLs or attempt to initiate a file transfer. This application can be enabled when there is an effort to propagate a virus in your organization through these methods.

Support for Microsoft Office Communicator 2005

While Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 supports Microsoft Windows Messenger 5.1 for basic presence and IM scenarios, SP1 delivers support for Microsoft Office Communicator 2005. New client features supported by Live Communications Server include:

- Search for contacts easily using the new Live Communications Server Address Book Service. This allows users to search for others via their corporate global address list (GAL), as well as local address in formation on their computer.

- Integrate with Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server to let users view other contacts' free/busy information from their schedule, as well as display their 'Out of Office' messages directly in Microsoft Office Communicator 2005.

- Extend presence, including the ability to allow users to set 'custom notes', to provide more rich information to other contacts, enabling them to make more informed decisions on how to interact. This information is displayed whether or not a user is on or offline, using the offline presence capabilities of Live Communications Server 2005.

- Control enterprise phones directly from a PC. With the appropriate private branch exchange (PBX) or public switched telephone network (PSTN) gateway infrastructure in place, Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 provides integration with enterprise telephony systems, allowing the user to initiate calls and even divert calls to a remote location when they are not at their desk.

- Initiate conference calls with partner service providers directly from Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 making it easier for information workers to communicate with others.

With Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 and partner solutions for telephony integration, Microsoft Office Communicator supports enterprise telephony integration, including call control, call intercept, and presence-enabled call forwarding as well as easy-to-initiate public switched telephone network (PSTN) conference calling and Microsoft Office Live Meeting sessions.

Additional Improvements and Changes

Additional improvements to Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 include:

- Support for multiple-tree forest topologies previously documented in Knowledge Base article KB#889327. For customers who have an Active Directory infrastructure consisting of two or more root domains that also define independent tree structures and separate DNS namespaces, the Live Communications Server 2005 Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in would not recognize the presence of more than one tree in an Active Directory forest. Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 fixes this previously documented issue.

- Improved server application program interface (API) performance. The server APIs in Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 can handle approximately three times more messages with a significantly lower CPU on the server.

- Improved in-place upgrade experience. The upgrade process from Live Communications Server 2005 to Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 is via an in-place upgrade that does not require the manual exporting and importing of existing databases as previously required with a Live Communications Server 2003 to Live Communications Server 2005 migration.