There are many options available if you are in the market for a VOiP based phone system, everyone wants to sell you a new system and do a rip and replace as far as your trusted traditional phone system goes.

When you want to IP enable your current phone system, there are not many options. Replacing the entire system maybe cost prohibitive and your phone system may be old enough to where you cannot add IP adapters to it.

This is when Microsoft’s Unified Communications strategy might be able to aid in rescue. Instead of having to rip and replace your existing phone system, would you not use software to simply IP enable your voice infrastructure? Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 is designed with that in mind.

You can integrate your current phone system, with whatever type of Telco connectivity it has to OCS. You can then have your users connect to OCS and unlike regular VOiP systems, you get enhanced IM functionality with presence information embedding in office products (Outlook, Excel, Word), you get VOiP connectivity from handhelds, you get video conferencing capability and Microsoft has tweaked the audio codecs so they perform really well in low bandwidth situations.

To read up more about Microsoft’s Unified Communications strategy, you may want to visit http://www.microsoft.com/uc if you are interested in finding out more about OCS 2007, you can visit http://www.microsoft.com/ocs or reply to this article with questions.

There are many ways to enable unified communications across your organization, there are hardware based solutions from companies like Cisco to software based solutions from the likes of Microsoft.

Office Communications Server 2007 or OCS 2007 is a venerable platform for providing communications connectivity, be it voice or video, keep in mind Exchange takes care of mailbox side of things for both voice, email and fax.

Currently, there are a limited number of devices available for direct connection to OCS, there’s even less number of gateways. So can OCS replace your phone system? Well it’s really not designed to do that, but with a gateway, it can and if you are already using softphones with your current phone system, you may be pleasantly surprised at the quality of the codec OCS uses, even on low bandwidth connections.

The beauty of OCS is the ability to embed presence information in items like documents, emails and spreadsheets. Imagine, you receiving a Spreadsheet of a colleague and immediately you can see in the Spreadsheet that your colleague is available via IM or voice, you can quickly and easily connect with the colleague and update the Spreadsheet. This resolves the issue of phone tag and allows for quick resolution and connectivity. Now, imagine you sent the Spreadsheet to a client and the client now has the same capability. I can see customer satisfaction soaring and everyone being able to get more done. Only catch is, the client will have to have OCS deployed on their side as well.

For an enterprise, an OCS deployment can entail 2, 3 or even more servers and gateways. For small deployments, all roles for OCS can be deployed on the same hardware and you can integrate it with systems like 3CX to provide the gateway capabilities. There is currently no documentation from 3CX about how to accomplish this, but if you understand the workings of OCS, you can integrate it and make it work. One company that is using OCS 2007 is Gibson Guitar.

Gibson uses Polycom CX700 IP phones, providing users with access to Exchange and Active Directory contact lists right from the phone! Very nice.