VOIP FROM PAGE 35 audience is dramatically different, with call features and add on to that a couple
Communications Group. the focus on small businesses in the of the innovative features so that it
“The ability to find who you want under-50-users set. “[Our focus] was is easier to administer from a setup
to communicate with, then to reach the small-business owner that needed standpoint and easier for a user to do
out and connect with them using the essentially their first phone, and they basic call functions,” he said.
form of communication that is most needed it to be very simple—basically, With these differing points of
effective—that was first and foremost to provide phone service,” Swift said. emphasis, the two products are worlds
in our design points,” Swift said. “We needed to take the basic phone apart in terms of features, architec-
“Regardless of where tures,platformsandlicensing
people are located and complexity. Even in the areas
what device they are on, where there could be oppor-
you are going to initiate tunity to standardize the user
conversation depending on Speech patterns experience across platforms,
what you need to talk about Both Office Communications Server 2007 and Response Point use Microsoft has chosen not to
and not be dependent on a speech recognition technology but in very different ways, depend- go that route at this time.
specific device or technol- ing on what Microsoft views as the requirements of the target During my tests of the two
ogy type,” he said. audience. products I found that some
Swift indicated that OCS Response Point technology is shared between
Requirements Users need to perform simple commands—such
customers to date generally as dialing contacts, transferring or parking calls, and checking voice the products, but in dra-
have more than 500 seats, mail—using only their voices. matically different ways. For
usually extending into the Objective Make it dead simple. Remove the complexity of figuring example, speech recognition
thousands. The initial version out how to do some of these tasks from the traditional telephone is offered in both products
handset’s keypad.
of OCS, he said, is optimized but is used for very different
for these larger organizations OCS 2007 purposes (see chart). Micro-
that are looking to collabo- Requirements Users need to connect with Outlook to have -mails read back to them and to verbally interact with the Calendar. soft officials say they plan to
rate across multiple locations, Objective Enable the information worker to collaborate and com- watch both product lines to
geographies and networks. municate more effectively. The speech engine has a development see what works for users and
With Response Point, on platform with APIs available for application development. what does not—and where the
the other hand, the target Source: e WEEK Labs lines should cross. ´
OCS FROM PAGE 39 experience with insight gleaned loss, packet reorder, packet errors, jitter
OCS Communicator session can share from within the system. and even the endpoint device in use.
a twinned extension—one that rings Instead of viewing packets strictly Since OCS by default uses Micro-through in both places, allowing a user from a network perspective, the Moni- soft’s RTAudio codec—which operates
to seamlessly move from one device to toring Server aggregates data from the as either a high-definition wideband or
the next, with OCS’ presence capabili- primary call control servers (which cull narrowband codec, depending on netties being aware of activity on the PBX data from the endpoints) and from the work conditions—all reported MOSes
extension. Mediation Servers (to monitor calls to are based on the richer experience
Quality control and from the PSTN). This data is col- expected from a wideband call. There- lected in the Monitoring Servers’ SQL fore, an in-network call between two
because ocs voice and video Server database, which can be queried people on the same subnet may get
calls are encrypted by default, net- using prepackaged Web-based reports. the maximum MOS of 4.1 (using a
work administrators will be able Thereportsarebrokenoutaccording wideband codec), while a call to the
to glean only a limited amount of toavenue(PC-to-PCcalls, PSTN-to-PC PSTN using a narrowband codec (as
QOS (quality of service) information calls, PC-to-PSTN calls and conference that’s all the PSTN will support) will get
from standard network-based VOIP calls) and provide several different only a score of about 2. 5. Consequently,
monitoring tools. To overcome this MOSes (mean opinion scores) to rep- network administrators will need to be
shortcoming, Microsoft produced resent incoming and outgoing sound retrained in the new scoring criteria
the OCS Quality of Experience Mon- quality, among other assessments. applicable for high-definition audio.
itoring Server role to help admin- The reports also provide information The full review of OCS is online
istrators monitor ongoing network on metrics such as codec used, packet at eweek.com. ´
