Microsoft to Unfurl a New Collaboration Road Map
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Microsoft is readying a host of new collaboration-specific software and service offerings that it is planning to deliver over the next two years, according to a road map that company officials are showing privately to partners. During the past couple of months, Microsoft has shared selectively with certain partners a "Collaboration Road Map" according to sources who requested anonymity. Beyond the Office 2007 client and SharePoint Server 2007 products—which are slated to be available to business users in October and to launch via all channels in January 2007—other collaboration deliverables on Microsoft's short list include a new Office Live Server, a slew of Antigen anti-virus services and a souped-up anti-spam package. Microsoft is expected to share details on some of these offerings during two June events. On June 6, Microsoft is slated to go public, via a Webcast, with its business-intelligence product road map. And on June 26, Microsoft will provide more details about its collaborative communication wares during a Unified Communications Group event for press and analysts in San Francisco. Microsoft announced the creation of a single internal Unified Communications Group—comprising the formerly separate Exchange and Real-Time Collaboration teams—in January. The group is headed by Anoop Gupta, who previously headed the Real-Time Collaboration team. UCG is part of Microsoft's Business Division under President Jeff Raikes. The group is leading Microsoft's charge in e-mail, instant messaging, VOIP (voice over IP) and Web conferencing for business users. According to partners, Microsoft's road map calls for the company to ship the following deliverables some time during the latter half of 2006:
Antigen is the brand name that Microsoft has been using for the past year for products and technologies that the company acquired in February 2005 when it bought Sybari Software.
On the list of calendar-year 2007 collaboration deliverables, in addition to Windows Longhorn Server and Exchange 2007 Server, partners said, are:
Last year, Microsoft confirmed plans to fold Live Meeting conferencing capabilities into the next version of Live Communications Server. In addition to on-premises Web conferencing, the soon-to-be-rebranded Office Live Server also will deliver multipoint audio/video and business-process integration functionality, company officials confirmed last July. Does this mean that the stand-alone LiveMeeting product's days are numbered? It doesn't seem so. When asked in late March by Microsoft Watch about the future of Live Meeting, Business Division President Raikes said: "A year from now, Live Meeting could be our best example of our combined software/service vision. Customers could choose between meetings on premises or housed in a cloud." One Microsoft business customer, who requested anonymity, said he expected Microsoft to tout LiveMeeting as a solution for external or third-party conferencing, and also build hooks to LiveMeeting into other Microsoft products. But larger organizations would be more likely to use the on-premises, server-based Office Live Server, he said.
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