Microsoft is close to making a firm step into the estimated $45 billion unified communications and voice industry with the releases of Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007. The Redmond company's examples of unified communications technologies are currently scheduled to launch in the fall of 2007. The code for both products is complete at this point, and will be released to manufacturing today, July 27. Office Communications Server was made available as a public beta in March of this year, and - according to Microsoft - the response has been quite healthy.

"We're making very, very fast progress on our voice and unified communications vision. More than 75,000 people have downloaded the beta in the last four months, and today I'm very pleased to announce that we are code complete and tomorrow we're releasing Office Communications Server and Office Communicator to manufacturing, and we'll be getting that out very broadly here in the next few months. With this milestone, we're one step closer to delivering the products that established Microsoft as a major force in unified communications and voice. And as a reminder, this is about a $45 billion industry, in particular the software part of the industry by 2010," revealed Jeff Raikes, President, Microsoft Business Division at the Financial Analyst Meeting 2007.

With the code complete, the Redmond company will now focus its development efforts on localizing Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 for international availability. Gurdeep Singh Pall, vice president of the Unified Communications Group revealed some of the pricing details associated with the two products. Essentially, Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 represent Microsoft's vision of unified communications based on a software, rather than a hardware infrastructure. And through its two software offerings, the Redmond company is getting ready to enable voice communications, instant messaging, email and video and web conferencing at an enterprise level.

"As with Live Communications Server, the predecessor to Office Communications Server, customers need both server and client access licenses (CALs). There are two types of Office Communications Server CALs: Standard and Enterprise. The Standard CAL has the IM and presence capabilities including new group IM and rich presence features and costs roughly $21 for the average enterprise. The new Enterprise CAL provides all of the new conferencing and VoIP call management features and costs roughly $97 for the average enterprise. The Office Communications Server Standard and Enterprise CALs will also be included as part of the Microsoft Enterprise CAL Suite, a bundle of several Microsoft server CALs available at a discount," Gurdeep Singh Pall explained.