OCS - New PIC Licensing and XMPP Gateway released

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We are excited to announce changes to the Office Communications Server Public IM Connectivity (PIC) license that provides instant messaging and presencefederation to the Windows Live, AOL and Yahoo! public IM networks.

  1. A PIC License will no longer be required for federation with American Online (AOL). Customers qualify for federation with AOL if they have Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Standard CAL or active Software Assurance on their current LCS/OCS license.
  2. Customers who want Yahoo! federation will continue to purchase PIC licenses. The price of PIC will be reduced by 50%, effective October 1, 2009, to reflect this change.

We are also excited to announce the release of the OCS 2007 R2 XMPP Gateway (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=141529). The Gateway provides Presence and two-party IM interoperability with the XMPP based systems of Jabber and Google Talk.

  1. The Gateway interoperability has been tested against Jabber CXP Server version 5.4 and the current version of Google Talk. The OCS 2007 R2 XMPP Gateway is supported by Microsoft Support
  2. This Gateway is licensed as Additional Software to OCS 2007 R2, meaning that there is no additional license cost associated with deploying the Gateway for OCS 2007 R2 licenses.

For more details about these two great announcements you can read the Microsoft Press Pass article with Eric Swift, General Manager of the Unified Communications Group at https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/oct09/10-01ucinterop.mspx