Howto:Innovaphone Support for OCS

Microsoft has gone a long way to arrive in the communications market, but now they are here: Oct 16th was the due date for the launch of Microsoft's Office Communication Server (OCS).

As this event has received pretty substantial attention in the market, many customers find theirselves asking and how does that fit into my innovaphone strategy? Here is how.

What is OCS?

OCS 2007 is the centerpiece of Microsoft’s unified communications strategy. It brings together e-mail, instant messaging, presence, voice and video. It consists of a set of services that reside under the hood and let users benefit from things like voice- and video conferencing, computer/telephony integration, chatting and so forth. Most importantly to the end-user, it includes a feature-rich soft-client, a.k.a. Office Communicator, that enables smooth access to these services.

Will OCS replace the PBX?

Unlikely. While OCS has inherent call routing functionality, it is not a PBX replacement. Microsoft itself admits that "in the foreseeable future", OCS will coexist with "traditional" PBX systems (where "traditional" means both TDM and IP PBXs here). In fact, from an innovaphone point of view, OCS is a perfect PBX-enhancement tool. For PC users, it provides a rich user interface to communication functions, including telephony, which is deeply integrated into todays office applications such as email, word processing etc. Combined with a powerfull call processing environment provided by the innovaphone PBX, it creates very good solution to customer requirements.

So how does innovaphone interface to the OCS?

There are basically two different interface levels: signalling and media stream.

On the signalling level, both call control and presence information is exchanged between the innovaphone PBX and OCS. It allows users to establish or tear down calls from the Office Communicator UI. Also, the PBX users busy-status is available to the OCS and this shown in the OC. Signalling is translated from the PBX to OCS and vice versa using a call control signalling gateway.

On the media stream level, there are 2 issues to consider. First OCS is using a today rather exotic SIP implementation (SIP via TCP). This will be implemented in the innovaphone media gateways as part of the envisaged security update. With its release, innovaphone media gateways may be used to interface the OCS to traditional (ISDN) trunk lines, to analog endpoints and of course any other PBX endpoint. As microsoft is exclusively using a proprietary codec (a.k.a. RTaudio), which is not used in standards-based solutions today, transcoding needs to be done from RTaudio to standard codecs such as G.711 or G.722. This transcoding function is performed by the OCS's 'mediation service server role. As of today, it is unclear, if or if not RTaudio is in fact publicly available to everone creating voice solutions. As a result, it is not yet decided if or if not innovaphone will implement RTaudio natively (which would eliminate the need for the pc-based mediation service).

Summary

OCS is expected to provide a rich unified communication solution to customers. innovaphone is commited to take advantage of the availability of OCS. Integrated innovaphone / OCS solutions can be set up today.

This information is based on field trials with the last public OCS beta available mid 2007. For further information, please consult innovaphone presales.