Communication can be full of inefficiencies; phone or e-mail "tag" is all too common; workers who are physically separated by geography and time zones lack visibility into other people's availability or "presence". Knowing a person's presence is especially important when there is a need for a critical business discussion or a time-sensitive decision has to be made. Live Communications Server helps your organization increase individual productivity using presence, instant messaging (IM), and real-time communication capabilities such as voice, video, and data collaboration.

The preferred client for Live Communications Service is Microsoft Office Communicator 2005. Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 provides integrated communications capabilities that include IM, extendable presence with Microsoft Exchange Server calendar information, PC based voice/video, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony.

For example, Live Communications Server enables users to display their status (for example, away, idle, busy, do not disturb) to other users. You can also determine who is offline or unavailable. With Microsoft Office Communicator 2005, offline presence details can be displayed even when a user is not logged in. By right-clicking on the name of a user who is offline, users can see if that user is available via other forms of communication such as e-mail or telephone (if the organization has taken advantage of telephony integration).

Collaborating with others can be challenging—even in the same geographic office location. Employees are often overloaded with information and e-mail as they constantly switch between business productivity applications. With Live Communications Server 2005, you can add real-time collaboration capabilities and presence, enabling higher productivity from users' favorite Microsoft Office programs such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, Microsoft Office Excel, and Microsoft Office Word. Presence information from the server can also be integrated into productivity applications and enterprise line-of-business (LOB) applications.

Live Communications Server 2005 is a valuable part of the Microsoft Office System because it also serves as the presence engine for team sites and portals, providing presence and IM access from within Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server sites. For example, you can enable the Members Web Part to see the presence of anyone associated with a SharePoint site, allowing information workers to spend more productive time in their business productivity applications.

Live Communications Server 2005 Public IM Connectivity provides organizations with the capability to connect their existing base of Live Communications Server-enabled users to trusted contacts using public IM services provided by MSN, AOL, and Yahoo!.

Live Communications Server 2005 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) will allow security enhanced IM and presence information between public IM service providers, providing enterprises with a way to collaborate with business partners as easily as co-workers, while keeping sensitive business information encrypted and logged. For more details on Public IM Connectivity, please see the Public IM Connectivity Overview or How to Buy pages.

Live Communications Server 2005 enables the ability to communicate and collaborate with remote users, via the Remote User option, which provides security enhanced IM and presence for users outside the corporate firewall—without requiring a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The IT manager now can offer seamless access to remote and home workers without the need for VPN. When someone wants to send a quick IM, requiring them to log on to a VPN is often time-prohibitive.

Workers can also log in to their IM interface from remote locations using a simple Internet connection and their Live Communications Server-compatible instant messaging client. These specific real-time communications capabilities immediately increase the productivity of team members regardless of their physical location.

Federation, perhaps the most compelling feature of Live Communications Server 2005, is the ability to establish trusted relationships between your organization and one or more external organizations, allowing users to initiate and share IM sessions and subscribe to user presence across network boundaries without the need for a VPN connection. This functionality is especially useful for acquisitions, companies with more than one geographic center, or those companies that have multiple partner contacts.

With the enhanced federation offered in Live Communications Server 2005 with SP1, IT administrators will no longer need to manually specify the Access Proxy of each and every federated organization or manually provide the Full Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of their organization’s Access Proxy to the organizations they wish to federate with. SP1 offers additional administrative control over the number of incoming and outgoing connections created on an individual Access Proxy and the ability to support an increased number of connections, offering additional capacity for more federated connections. These features can help reduce the time needed to manage the growth of their IM infrastructure, saving valuable budgetary resources.

Whether your enterprise organization is challenged to improve existing methods of information security, regulatory compliance, or server performance, Live Communications Server has an extensive list of features designed to support large organizations. Features such as IM encryption, logging and archiving, and server-side contact lists provide enhanced security for sensitive business information and reduce exposure to spam over IM (SPIM) or intellectual property (IP) breaches that plague public IM networks. Additionally, Live Communications Server, with additional partner solutions for data archiving, supports new United States government regulations for electronic communication required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

With the new management tools built into Live Communications Server 2005, IT managers can, at a glance, get more of the information they need about their server environment. They save time and reduce training costs by using familiar Windows graphical user interface (GUI)-based administration tools, including Windows Management Interface (WMI), Microsoft Management Console (MMC), and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) to manage users, servers, and global settings, plus monitor the entire real-time collaboration system.

For those enterprises with tens of thousands of employees, or those wanting to take advantage of a clustered architecture, Live Communications Server 2005 Enterprise Edition is ideal. Live Communications Server 2005 Enterprise Edition consists of a pool of servers connected to a separate, shared SQL Server database. This two-tier architecture enables Enterprise Edition to deliver substantial improvements in availability, scalability, performance, and data recovery such as:

• SQL Server-based logging. Searchable IM conversation logs based on SQL Server allow for future reference or for use in regulated environments.
• Two-tier architecture. Enterprise Edition enables two new server roles: a front-end pool of Enterprise Edition servers for handling client connections and a back-end database server (using SQL Server) for storing user data.
• Data recovery. Enterprise Edition uses SQL Server to store user data. SQL can be clustered and/or backed up for improved data safety using standard SQL data recovery processes.
• Availability. Enterprise Edition uses two-tier server architecture that enables users to find and connect to the next available Enterprise Edition server, even if one or more have failed.
• Scalability. In large deployments, numerous individual Standard Edition home servers may be necessary to manage users and direct traffic. With Enterprise Edition, all user data is stored in a central SQL Server, allowing the ability to add more Enterprise Edition front-end servers to handle the increasing load and capacity.

Allow person-to-person communication across your organization without expensive business travel or costly phone bills. Live Communications Server can help you dramatically reduce your operating costs by using presence and IM to replace some travel and long distance or international calls.

When IM does not provide enough collaborative discussion, users can immediately initiate an audio conversation, using a regular computer microphone and speakers or a headset device. Users can also make PC-to-phone and phone-to-PC audio calls through the standard public switched telephone network (PSTN) with an appropriate gateway deployment. Video conferencing adds another dimension: in a video conference, users can see and hear each other in real-time.

Live Communications Server is based on industry standards with client and server Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that enable innovative applications and customized solutions using presence and other real-time capabilities.

The architecture of Live Communications Server uses the industry-standard protocols Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE), and includes a rich set of APIs. Because SIP and SIMPLE are industry standard protocols, a developer can create presence, IM, audio, video and data collaboration, conferencing, and telephony solutions, or even integrate presence and real time capabilities into your existing applications. Learn more about Live Communications Server APIs.