I'm on an Office Communication Server (OCS) course this week so I was just doing a bit of digging around to see what clients are available.
For Windows there are the usual Office Communicator and Live Meeting clients that will be used by the vast majority of users. There's also Messenger for Mac which provides access on Apple clients, and supports all the IM and conferencing functionality. For Windows Mobile phones the Communicator Mobile client does presence, IM and integration with the telephoney side of OCS.
Until today I hadn't really looked into what other clients were out there. One interesting one I found is called WebMessenger and provides an LCS and OCS client for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symian, Palm and apparently the iPhone. It sounds great at first glace, but it seems like it requries additional backend components (I could be wrong, I've not gone into any detail). Not really ideal, quite what they're doing over and above the standard OCS edge roles I'm not sure. But, if you need an iPhone or Blackberry client it might be worth a look.
With MS's recent moves to make their products a little more platform independent, hopefully they'll port Communicator Mobile to the iPhone at some point. Whether Apple and the networks will want them to enable all the VoIP telephoney features I don't know, but just contacts, presence and IM would be useful.
Update: Since this post another OCS client for iPhone has been released, I've written an updated article about it here: iDialog Office Communications Server Client for iPhone
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2 Comments
1 Jonathan Gardner
Posted Nov 16, 2009 at 6:46 pmPermalink
With iPhones becoming more and more commonplace in the enterprise I am surprised that we have not seen something that will work with it yet. I am very much looking forward to when it does.
2 Tom Basham
Posted Nov 17, 2009 at 9:10 amPermalink
Jonathan,
There's an updated post here about a more recent release of a product that does provide an OCS client for the iPhone:
http://refraction.co.uk/blog/2009/08/23/idialog-office-communication-server-iphone-client/
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