Office Communications Server is the emerging platform for presence, instant messaging, conferencing, and enterprise voice for businesses around the world.

Streamlined Communications
People manage their communications across many devices and applications, which can have a negative impact on productivity. Office Communications Server streamlines the way users manage communications, which allows them to find and communicate with the right person, right now, from the applications they use most.

Operational Flexibility and Control
IT departments are expected to manage cost control, security, integration with existing infrastructure, and compliance requirements. Office Communications Server allows IT administrators to meet these challenges effectively by giving them the ability to provide flexible communications solutions to users and by delivering the tools they need to help manage flexible, secure and compliant communications.

Extensible Communications Platform
One advantage of a software-based communications infrastructure is that businesses can embed communications capabilities into existing line-of-business applications and use communications and workflow capabilities to automate business processes, which saves money, saves time, and improves customer service. Office Communications Server delivers an extensible communications platform that works with an organization’s existing messaging and telephony infrastructure and can adapt to changing business needs.

Why would your business deploy Office Communications Server?
With the economic crisis and unstable energy prices, corporations are taking a close look at cutting costs and carbon emissions. Yet organizations need an ability to transform ideas into value to maintain their competitive advantage. Microsoft unified communications help organizations reduce the operating costs of travel, telecom and IT, while allowing them to improve their business outcomes in a sustainable way.

Decreasing Costs
Reduced Travel and Training Costs – Web and videoconferencing, as well as other unified communications (UC) modalities, connect participants with meetings or “events” where they do not need to be physically present. Pre-sales work, internal meetings, training and staff performance reviews are activities that frequently require less travel after deploying a UC solution. Using UC solutions to deliver training to employees through their desktops provides savings in areas of travel, specific training costs, and productivity, because employees can train on their own time rather than at set times.

Lower Real-Estate and Facility Costs – Using collaborative technologies such as presence awareness and soft telephony client and videoconferencing, some organizations can expand operations and geographic reach without the costs of additional office infrastructure, which can reduce office space per employee and improve space utilization.

Reduce Telephony and Conferencing Service Charges – Traditional conference call services are expensive. Organizations will see significant reductions in the amounts paid for dial-in meeting services purchased from teleconferencing vendors by replacing them with IP network based conferencing capabilities. Presence awareness and UC products result in fewer telephone calls because callers can see the availability of intended recipients and recipients can determine rules for how they wish to be reached. Replace long distance and audio conferencing call charges with VoIP and save the cost of office move for phones.

Reduced Cost of Voice Mail –With Microsoft unified communications solutions, e-mail, voice mail, faxes and calendar events all arrive in one inbox and all managed in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Integrated unified messaging (UM) systems allow site and server consolidation, reducing the total number of servers required to provide voice mail and fax service. Consolidation can dramatically lower maintenance and upkeep costs, particularly for organizations with remote or branch offices.

Lower IT Infrastructure and Administration Costs – With Microsoft unified communications solutions, organizations can simplify management and maximize resources and budget with increased flexibility.

Improving Business Outcomes
Improved User and Team Productivity – Microsoft unified communications solutions allow users to increase productivity by making it easier to contact colleagues for information, check for messages, and work while out of the office.

Faster Project Completion – Improved communication within project teams improves efficiency and reduces completion time, as does the ability to reach out to subject matter experts beyond the project team, which allows teams to complete more projects. These capabilities can also bring the same benefits to product development time, which can result in decreased time to market for new products.

Shortened Sales Cycle Times – Microsoft unified communications solutions promote collaboration on sales presentations and speed responses to customer questions. Presence awareness allows salespeople to find the subject matter experts they need to answer questions quickly and easily, which can reduce time spent on proposals and responding to customer questions. These advantages can increase the number of proposals delivered and won.

Faster Resolution of Customer Issues – Enhanced communication between customer service and subject matter experts through presence awareness, call forwarding, and other tools, means customer issues can be resolved quickly, which can reduce the cost required to handle customer calls and interactions.

Attract and Retain Employees – Microsoft unified communications can provide a flexible working environment for workers, which can reduce turnover and costs associated with hiring. Further, being able to provide the latest tools can have a positive effect on attracting new talent.

Protecting the Environment
Reduced Carbon Footprint – Microsoft unified communications solutions can help reduce travel to meetings or training. Replacing travel with Web conferences reduces fossil fuel consumption. VoIP users can also reduce power consumption through the use of USB phones, which consume less power than conventional phones. Learn more about Microsoft environmental sustainability initiatives.