Microsoft announces LCS client

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. says its upcoming Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005 instant messaging server will feature a front-end application that links LCS 2005 with end users' telephones.
The new application adds another way of reaching LCS users on top of existing avenues such as instant messaging and voice and video.
Microsoft announced the application, code-named Istanbul, today at the Fall 2004 VON Conference and Expo in Boston.
"This is a big change. For the first time, end users will be able to think of their enterprise PBX phone as part of the overall real-time collaboration infrastructure," said Ed Simnett, Microsoft's lead product manager for Istanbul. Istanbul can also be configured to dial cell phones and lines outside a company's internal switchboard. "Any phone becomes an addressable end point to LCS," he said.
Istanbul, scheduled to ship by mid 2005, will be the preferred front end to LCS 2005, which Microsoft plans to ship by the end of this year.
The front end to LCS 2003, the current version of the server, is Windows Messenger. Istanbul isn't designed for LCS 2003, and while Microsoft will continue to support Windows Messenger, it's unlikely there will be a 6.0 version of the product, Simnett said.
Another improvement in Istanbul is that it will offer deeper integration with the Microsoft Office product family. With that, for example, an Exchange user's out-of-office message will show up not only when someone sends the user an e-mail but also when someone tries to reach him via LCS 2005. Istanbul will also offer improved audio and video capabilities, such as a larger video screen, according to Microsoft.
"This is a major effort on Microsoft's behalf to merge the idea of real-time computer communication and real-time phone communication. The primary benefit of this is tying instant-messaging-type clients to the PBX infrastructure that most big firms already have," said Nate Root, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
Still, in the near future, Microsoft will face challenges encouraging users to adopt Istanbul because there isn't a lot of demand yet among enterprise users for this type of functionality, according to Root. "Istanbul is a solution for a problem most users and companies don't know they have," he said. "This is true of any radically new communications paradigm."
Users are comfortable with the phone and with instant messaging as workplace communications tools, but getting them to embrace Istanbul as a central, integrated tool for managing phone, IM and other communications tools will take some work, Root said. "The first and

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