I can finally retract my earlier statement about OCS 2007 not really being a conference bridge. This is officially resolved in OCS 2007 R2. I saw a great demo of the audio conferencing at VoiceCon. And, not to sound like too much of a fanboy, but… it rocked.
I know what you’re thinking: whoopdedoo: Microsoft can now do what any conference bridge has been able to do for centuries. And there is some element of truth to that: my well-known opinion is that the original version of OCS should have contained this feature. But MS has gone a lot further than just allowing PSTN access. You can join from a browser (Eric Swift of MS demonstrated this with Firefox and said that it also works with Safari. I’ll have to try that on my iMac at home!) And a bunch of other nice features to boot.
The conferencing, overall, is a vast improvement. I think that this will make a huge difference to customers. And I can now expect to stop taking so much grief from Microsoft people for my hating on OCS’s conferencing abilities!! J Naw – to be fair, this has been at the top of the priority list for a long time. Microsoft recognized this as a feature that customers wanted, and it’s been delivered.
It’s the real deal and then some.
Once I have the ability, I’ll record a short demo of all the new conferencing capabilities. I should have my hands on OCS R2 within a few weeks and will gladly post some snippets of functionality.
