I have been using Microsoft Messenger for a number of years (it’s name changed but I cannot recall the old one). Recently we deployed new Communicator 2007 into production and I must say I am very happy with its possibilities.

Conversation History

One of the most important features of the new Communicator is the ability to track all your conversations. But wait, there is more: all stored conversations will be stored as your Outlook (Exchange) items. Storing conversations as Outlook items allows you to easily search and organize all conversations from a central place. If your users are already used to Outlook, they do not need to learn a new interface.

You can also access your conversation history from Outlook Web Access (see below).

Administrators will love it too. You will only need to backup central Exchange database and all the conversations will be backuped.

Reply with instant message

Outlook gives you the ability to reply to an email with an instant message. That’s cool! All your conversations will be kept in Outlook so you can easily find them later on.

Presence

One of the key features of Office Communicator is presence information. By default OC will connect with your Exchange calendar and display Free-Busy-Away statuses according to your calendar. You can also change the status manually.

Presence is being displayed in Communicator client, but also on top of each email message in Outlook and in SharePoint. So when someone creates a document, you will be able to see his status next to his name in a document library. A number of actions is available to you (see figure on the left)

The same applies to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Learn more.

VOIP

OCS 2007 also gives you the ability for VOIP and video conferencing, but these need to be configured at server level.

Communicator is more than a regular IM client because it is tightly integrated with other Microsoft Office products. Domain administrator can manage and deploy OC by a Group policy. If you do not have OC, you can get it here.

Five stars for Office Communicator 2007.