Good news for UC at large: Here at VoiceCon, Microsoft and IBM have committed to having federation interoperability for Office Communications Server 2007 and Lotus SameTime – support for it will be official in Q1 of 2009. For OCS, this will be part of the R2 release, according to Eric Swift of Microsoft. There will be no additional charge from either IBM or Microsoft to make this happen. IBM are still working on federation interop with MSN, which is not yet complete. But for now SameTime / OCS integration is a great improvement.
Cisco and Microsoft will also be supporting federation between OCS and Cisco Unified Presence Server in a near future release, there was less clarity about the roadmap there, but it did sound forthcoming.
This is good news for all of us – to see the big players working together to come closer to an agreement on standards for IM and presence. I’m looking forward to a world where presence and IM are interoperable much the way e-mail systems are today.
