Microsoft prepares to ship new corporate IM server

IDG News Service - A little over a year after introducing the first version of Office Live Communications Server, Microsoft Corp. said yesterday that it plans to release the next version of its enterprise instant messaging software in December.
As previously announced, Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005 includes support for federation, allowing users to extend their instant messaging (IM) and presence service to other companies, the ability to connect to IM from outside a corporate network without requiring a virtual private network connection and interoperability with popular public IM services run by Microsoft, Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc. That interoperability isn't due until the first half of 2005, however.
Microsoft will also start selling two different versions of LCS with the 2005 release: a Standard Edition and an Enterprise Edition, as it does with many of its server products, said Dennis Karlinsky, a lead product manager at Microsoft. LCS 2005 was released to manufacturing on Friday and will be generally available in December.
Both LCS 2005 editions support federation, outside access and interoperability, Karlinsky said. But to take advantage of these features, LCS users will have to set up an additional LCS server and run that as an edge proxy server to connect to other users of the product, allow external connections or connect with public networks.
Enterprise Edition is designed for use by large organizations. Priced at $3,000 per server, the product provides support for up to 20,000 active users and requires Microsoft's SQL Server as a data store for user information. Users can place several LCS 2005 Enterprise Edition servers behind a load balancer. If one server fails, another can serve those users, Microsoft said.
LCS 2005 Standard Edition includes the Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine for storing user information, as does the current LCS 2003. Users still need SQL Server for features such as archiving IM and logging user actions. Standard Edition will be priced at $750 per server and can support up to 15,000 active users, according to Microsoft.
LCS 2005 will work with the current Windows Messenger client and with a recently announced new client code-named Istanbul that's designed to add telephony support to IM. Istanbul is due in the first half of 2005 (see story).
Pricing for client access licenses (CAL) for each user wasn't disclosed. A Microsoft spokesman said the vendor is looking at several options, but said pricing probably won't change much from the $25 per CAL charged for LCS 2003.
Microsoft's upgraded IM server is a substantial step forward, said Peter Pawlak, a lead