- Posted by ploft on November 4, 2008
What’s new in OCS 2007 R2:
So I attended this sessions because of my involvement in at Vertica implementing the OCS 2007 for some time now – mainly scratching my head trying to figure out how to get the enterprise VOIP part working properly. Therefore this session had my attention in addition to features and manageability, hoping there would be abit more “help” on with the parts that I’ve been struggling with.
Some of the new cool features I could mention:
- Call Routing rules
- Call queuing
- Use of IVR/Text to speech treatment of calls (For you Danes who have used the DSB voice order system, I could imagine some skepticism – I would too)
- Direct support for ITSP access to PSTN and mobile phone network without the use of Session Border Controller
- Voice quality is even better
- Built in Desktop sharing in the Communicator
- Communicator software for most phones out there, even phones not running Windows Mobile or Symbian (wee hu, they actually had a picture of my Nokia 6300 up on the slide of supported phones – who would have guessed my old plain mobile phone would be supported)
- OCS can now host a conference call outside the network, making the OCS call the outside-party
One of the more exciting new features was the OCS Attendant for receptionists and people handling a lot of calls. The application is built on top of the public API of OCS and gives the user an overview of incoming calls, user’s free/busy/on-the-phone status in the enterprise and possibility to manage people on hold. Another great feature here is the ability to forward/transfer calls using the normal procedure of giving the receiver a voice-message over the phone, before transferring or transfer the call, along with a instant message. I would guess this tool offer great help and flexibility to enterprises today, and making the switch for the “old” IP-phone system to mainly using the OCS as a phone platform.
Eric Swift (senior director of Microsoft's Unified Communications Group) also showed example of using the API for making bots for and auto-messaging, which also sounds very interesting. Not the example itself, but possibilities in the open API and opportunity to make very customized software solutions pulling and showing info from the OCS system. Consider this scenario, the bot sends a message to you: “Hi Peter, are you able to participate in a customer meeting, Thursday, 3rd this month.” You answer, and depending on the logic you’ve made in the bot, it parses it – and in this example, adds an event to your calendar.