We are pleased to announce that the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Speech Server (a.k.a. Speech Server (2007)) runtime is now officially supported on Windows Server 2008, in addition to the originally supported Windows Server 2003 Platforms(listed at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb813400.aspx).

Microsoft will support application deployments, Administrative tools and Data Processing Utilities like the MssLogToDatabase and MssLogToText tools. However Microsoft will not support installation and usage of the Development Tools that include Speech Server (2007) application development, call data analysis and grammar tuning running on Windows Server 2008. For those tools please refer  back to the original list of supported Platforms for development at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb662074.aspx.

To illustrate the above, the following screenshot shows the Speech Server (2007) components that are officially supported to run on Windows Server 2008. Please note that the installation wizard will not block you selecting the "Development Tools" option automatically, when you run the setup on the Windows Server 2008 operating system, so you will have to make sure that you do not select the Development Tools option during the installation process.

We expect that Windows Server 2008 support will benefit many customers who are deploying Windows Server 2008 today!

Microsoft is still investigating potential support for Windows Server 2008 R2 for Speech Server (2007). We will inform you via this blog in case we have more to announce on that topic. Till then customers are advised not to deploy Speech Server (2007) on Windows Server 2008 R2.