More than 75% of organizations are using, planning to use, or evaluating unified-communications products, according to Nemertes' “Building a Successful Virtual Workplace” benchmark.

So it's no wonder Microsoft's beta release of Office Communications Server 2007 has so many IT decision-makers looking into their crystal balls to figure out how the world's largest software vendor might play into their telephony strategies.

OCS is Microsoft's latest unified-communications offering, which integrates IP voice with Office and other applications. Microsoft wants companies to use Office as the front-end to their telephony and rely upon OCS for the back-end, directly positioning themselves against traditional IP-PBX vendors.

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