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Exchange Online / SharePoint Online / Office Live Meeting / Office Communications Online
Agility is a cornerstone of business success in today’s ever-changing global marketplace. Agile organizations can react swiftly and respond effectively to opportunities and challenges. They utilize robust tools that allow impromptu communication and real-time collaboration with co-workers and decision-makers. Yet many companies today are held back by their reliance on yesterday’s communications technologies. Their workers still engage in phone and e-mail tag, resulting in lost productivity and delayed decision-making. They incur travel expenses and costly long-distance charges to communicate with colleagues physically separated by location or time zone, driving up operations budgets.
Microsoft® Office Communications Online1 delivers robust instant messaging (IM) and presence functionality that enables real-time person-to-person communication across an organization. Through presence awareness, workers can quickly detect a colleague’s availability for a time-sensitive consult or business-critical decision – and then connect rapidly using a reliable, security-enhanced IM solution. Whether team members are in the next room or on the next continent, the powerful combination of presence awareness and IM can help improve productivity, drive business efficiencies and build a more agile organization.
How It Works
Office Communications Online is a core offering of Microsoft Online Services, the integrated suite of Internet-based software plus services that also includes Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint® Online, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting. Like these other offerings the Office Communications Online service leverages redundant and geographically dispersed data centers operated by Microsoft around the world. Each data center houses a reliable infrastructure to support the service and best-in-class security practices. As a result, Office Communications Online helps simplify IT management by removing the customer's need to deploy, configure, monitor and update/upgrade a communications and collaboration solution on premises. The customer’s service administrator has access to an easy-to-use online Administration Center console for managing user accounts and services. Office Communications Online also includes upgrades to new release versions at no additional charge, which shifts the burden for upgrade planning and execution from the customer to Microsoft.
Key features include:
Ability to display and detect presence availability of other users on the network
- Instant messaging over the Internet or a corporate network, with IM text encrypted
- Integration with Microsoft Office Outlook®, Microsoft Office Excel® and Microsoft Office Word for presence awareness and collaboration
- Presence integration with SharePoint sites
- Users can add distribution lists to their Contact Lists and IM with individuals or the entire list
- Person-to-person (1:1) audio and video inside a company LAN (between firewalls) environment
- Remote access to the service over the Internet
- Built on the proven capabilities of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2
- Increased network security with the Intelligent Instant Message Filter program
- Sign In application installed on users’ computers to provide a single sign-in point
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Features of Office Communication Online
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| Standard Parameters |
Users display and detect availability on corporate network with presence; includes presence integration with Microsoft Office 2007 and SharePoint sites
Instant messaging (IM) text automatically encrypted for added security
1:1 audio and video (limited to two PCs on the same corporate network where no firewall or other devices exist between the parties)
Virus/spam message filtering via Intelligent Instant Message Filter
Single sign-on capability for users via Sign In application
24/7 Web form and phone-based Tier 2 support for IT administrator
User subscription fee
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| Service Access |
Requires Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 (separate purchase and installation required) 2 |
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| Remote Access |
Users may connect directly to the service over the Internet, without connecting to the customer’s corporate network through a Remote Access Service (RAS) or virtual private network (VPN) |
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| Contact/Distribution Lists |
Each user can have up to 250 contacts
Each distribution list counts as one contact
Distribution lists with 100 or fewer members are expandable |
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| Security |
Intelligent Instant Message Filter program helps protect customer network and Microsoft managed network and provides enhanced URL filtering and enhanced file filter control |
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| Service Level Agreements |
99.9% uptime with financially backed service level agreements |
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| Service Continuity |
Redundant data centers efficiently restore service in the event of hardware failures or natural disasters |
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| Platform Upgrades |
Improvements to the Microsoft Online Services hosting environment—including updates to server products—are passed on to customers |
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| Directory Synchronization Tool |
This Microsoft tool can synchronize your on-premise Active Directory with the Microsoft Online Active Directory |
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| Administration Center |
Centralized, Web-based access for managing Office Communications Online services |
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| Sign In Tool |
Provides single sign-on capability and access to all Microsoft Online Services |
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