Can I Add in Other Accounts in my Office Communicator?

IT can make it to where your Office Communicator users can add in users who have AOL, MSN, and Yahoo accounts or email addresses. The question posed was about adding in other users from other companies, such as Gmail and others.

Technically it is an issue of support in the product or available gateways. We have issued a specification on how we have implemented Federation with the SIP/SIMPLE protocol on which Live Communications Server/Office Communications Services (LCS/OCS) is based (https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=01ba4f2b-f2d5-4b88-944e-a5f5e5106f81&DisplayLang=en ). In the LCS/OCS product this is the built in way for Federation. It is how we communicate with AOL/YAHOO/MSN. They have a SIP Access Proxy that we connect to that conforms to our requirements.

GMail specifically is based on XMMP (or Jabber). The Jabber product (I do not know if this is what GMail actually use for IM) also has a built in SIP Gateway that can connect to LCS (and I presume OCS). In this case the support for connectivity has been build into their end. See the following article on theier site: (https://www.jabber.com/CE/MicrosoftLCS ) .

There are also 3rd Party gateways out there from companies like Convergence that provide connectivity to SameTime (https://www.covergence.com/content267.html ).

So technically it may be possible, depending on what is in place.