Asterisk & Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 integration
June 20th, 2008 | Published in Asterisk Integration | 1 Comment
Some people might consider it sacrilege to mention a company like Microsoft in a community like this but I’m going to anyway… live with it. I’m still waiting for Digium to roll out some sort of Unified Communications solution to Asterisk besides Switchvox which is in my opinion a completely different breed that I’m not ready to deploy for a large enterprise organizations. So until that happens, we’re integrating with other Unified Communication solutions which really isn’t that bad. One such example is Asterisk integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 which was discussed in detail by Tom Keating on the TMCnet blog.
As much as us Open Source folks probably loath working with anything Microsoft, and as much as I myself try to always find the Open Source alternative to any business application, I think this could be an interesting and compelling UC integration for selling Asterisk into enterprise organizations. Most big businesses aren’t ready to ditch their proprietary software nor are they ready to kick out the Microsoft guy who sits on their board, so by integrating Asterisk with OCS 2007, you can somewhat sideline some of the Open Source concerns while still deploying an IP PBX in the background that is based on Asterisk. I hate to say it, but Microsoft OCS has a pretty sexy user interface and unlike Cisco Call Manager which is also sexy, Microsoft OCS will at least integrate with Asterisk.
It looks like this type of integration is still in its early stages and there’s certainly some bugs to be ironed out. For example, Asterisk uses SIP over UDP while OCS 2007 uses SIP over TCP. There are workarounds available but sometime soon I’m sure that Asterisk will support SIP over TCP while at the same time OCS 2007 should soon use SIP over UDP, both of which sound to be in the works.
I’d be interested to hear from this community whether anyone has already done some work with Asterisk and OCS 2007. What other hurdles did you encounter and how well has this integration been received? I’m sure soon we’ll be doing this type of integration as a fantastic means to continue deploying Asterisk to satisfy the communication requirements of large enterprises but either way this is all just another testament to Asterisk ability to integrate with almost anything!
April 16th, 2009at 6:02 pm(#)
Hey Eddie, great points. Integrating OCS and Asterisks could be a match made in heaven. We are one of a handful Microsoft partners certified to deploy and integrate OCS with legacy and IP base phone systems. We have sold and competed against Avaya, Cisco, Notel, Shoretel, and all the usual suspects for over 7 years. They all have the same basic features and I have found that most users (including me) only use about 5-7. Everyone who sees a demo of Microsoft’s unified communication is blown away. Unfortunately they are still lacking in some key areas, such as remote branch and call center solutions abd ensuring that licensing costs are optimized and not duplicated in a multi-vendor environment (i.e. Cisco + OCS or Avaya + OCS) can be challenging. In our office we have an Avaya S8300 connected to OCS via a Audiocodes gateway. I have not picked up my Avaya handset in over a year. OCS has truly changed the way I communicate and collaborate on a daily basis. Given that OCS R2 supports SIP trunking I would like to talk to anybody who has successfully integrated OCS and Asterisks without a gateway.