Microsoft talks up Live Communications Server 2005

Microsoft today released Office Live Communications Server 2005 to manufacturing.

Available for the first time in both Standard and Enterprise Editions, the offering is designed to allow firms to extend their presence awareness-enabled enterprise instant messaging (IM) systems beyond corporate firewalls to branch offices, remote business partners and third parties.

End users of the latest Live Communications Server 2005 Standard version will, said Microsoft, be able to connect to presence and IM capabilities when they are outside corporate networks, whether working from home or on the road, or visiting customers or partners.

This authenticated access is provided through standard firewall ports configuration without the need to establish a virtual private network, according to the company.

The Enterprise Edition features a tiered architecture using Microsoft SQL Server which, the company claimed, "substantially improves" reliability, availability and scalability. It also ships with enhanced management options and support for pooling Live Communications Server 2005 Enterprise Edition servers to support "up to hundreds of thousands of users".

Live Communications Server 2005 also functions as a real-time collaboration platform built on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions.

"The release to manufacturing of Live Communications Server 2005 marks an important milestone in delivering on our vision for extending the value of Microsoft Office System to encompass rich real-time collaboration capabilities, empowering people to work together more effectively," said Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of real-time collaboration at Microsoft.

"This is a powerful upgrade to our standards-based enterprise instant messaging platform and delivers native federation capabilities, instant messaging and presence integration with the security and scalability requirements that are so critical for our enterprise customers."

The offering has been released to manufacturers and will be available on 1 December through standard Microsoft distribution channels and Microsoft volume licensing.