BANGALORE, INDIA: In a global economy, most companies need to make persistent calls to clients, colleagues, vendors and other stakeholders on a daily basis. And when chasing business you don't mind whether it's a national or international call. However, the expenses incurred on this mammoth activity do warrant a rethink in strategy. Our organization makes 20+ international calls a day, each with a duration of more than 30 minutes.

The average cost per month incurred due to this comes to Rs 1,50,000. We decided to have VoIP in place and also a collaboration mechanism where users could exchange information at will. This would be topped with a mix of chat, conferencing and web meeting abilities. After a careful evalution of solutions available, MS Office Communicator came out trumps.

We used HP ProLiant DL380 G3 server, the Intel Xeon CPU 2.80 GHz, 2GB of RAM, 3 Ultra 320 SCSI HDD of 72.8 GB (RAID5), for display we used Rage XL PCI Family (ATIES), and 2x 1HP NC 7781 Ethernet Adapter, alongwith an optical drive.

Software requirements
The minimum and recommended operating system platform requirements for all Office Communications Server 2007 server roles are 32-bit Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 Standard Edition and Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition.

You can check the availability status of a colleague. Plus, you can send messages, invitations for conference call, schedule a meeting, etc.

A point to note here is that OCS Server Roles will only install on 32-bit Windows 2003 operating systems. 64-bit OS is not supported and this has been verified by Microsoft UC SWAT Team.