Cisco and Microsoft are competitors in the unified communications space, with very different visions and product approaches – I don’t think that’s going to come as a surprise to anyone. Nor should it be a surprise that many customers have Cisco networking and telephony gear along with desktop, messaging and collaboration software from Microsoft and want our products to interoperate together well in the customer’s environment.
To Microsoft, that means we want to offer customers software that runs great on Cisco networks. With Office Communications Server’s support for the Cisco ISR platform, great support for DSCP packet marking to deliver QoS, VLAN tagging, and many more technologies, we are delivering a lot of capabilities so customers can get the most out of their Cisco network investments.
We also look to interoperate broadly using open standards with Cisco products in unified communications. As part of both companies’ commitments to our customers and shareholders, we’ve recently published a joint statement of interoperability for our products in unified communications, specifically addressing how Microsoft Office Communications Server and Cisco Unified Communications Manager work together across three different deployment scenarios, and what each company supports. You can download that statement on the Microsoft site and yes the same document from the Cisco site.
The statement was drafted specifically with regard to Cisco of course, but an important point to remember is that Microsoft looks at interoperability across all of the vendors in a particular space – we don’t provide preferential treatment to support Cisco products or scenarios uniquely. So the support statements we’ve crafted with Cisco, while applying directly to Cisco products, are founded on principles that can be applied to any vendor’s products in a given scenario.
The first scenario is Direct SIP, where Office Communications Server is a peer telephony platform to an IP-PBX and exchanges calls using SIP, without the use of an intermediate gateway. A number of IP-PBXs have qualified for Direct SIP support with Office Communications Server by engaging through our Unified Communications Open Interoperability Program (UCOIP) to provide joint support. In addition to that effort, Microsoft also tests IP-PBXs that have not engaged in the program, based on customer demand. As such, we delineate between products that have been “qualified”, where the IP-PBX vendor engages through the UCOIP and both companies support the integration, and those that have been “tested”, where Microsoft solely does the testing and supports the configuration. This is why you see some versions of Cisco Unified Communications Manager supported by Microsoft for Direct SIP, but not by Cisco. Our customers have clearly told us it’s important to provide both programs, as many have older IP-PBXs that vendors may not choose to come through the UCOIP. Those models Microsoft can test and potentially support (based on the IP-PBXs adherence to standard-based SIP), allowing customers to get more value out of their existing investments.
The second scenario is Remote Call Control (RCC), where the PBX station set (doesn’t have to be IP in this case) is controlled by Office Communicator. Here, we don’t have a testing or qualification program – there are many PBXs and Gateways that support the ECMA TR/87 standard used by RCC and those products will work with Office Communicator, as we support the TR/87 interface. Many PBX vendors will have a specific testing matrix for which middleware layer or CTI link is supported with Office Communications Server. In addition, there are a variety of RCC gateways in the market from companies like CoreBridge, Estos and Genesys that further expand the diversity of PBX models and versions available. Microsoft has announced the deprecation of the RCC feature for the next release of Office Communications Server, so new deployments of RCC will not be supported with the coming release. However, customers who have existing deployments of RCC can upgrade to the next release and will continue to be supported through the lifecycle of that release – a good long time.
Finally, several PBX vendors have brought to market plug-ins to Microsoft Office Communicator that allow for Office Communicator to interact directly with a PBX environment. These plug-ins are built on top of the Office Communications Server APIs which provide an extensible platform for the development of communications integrated directly into business process applications, customizing the functionality of Office Communicator or Office Communications Server and much more. Microsoft welcomes all vendors who build on our platform, whether they are Microsoft ISVs, Partners or traditional competitors in the unified communications space. My colleague BJ Haberkorn has devoted an entire blog post to this, and specifically discusses the Cisco Unified Communications Integration for Microsoft Office Communicator, or CUCiMOC – don’t hesitate to check that out.
Finally, look forward to the dialogue - I’ll hound the blog for comments, or you can contact me directly at [sip | smtp] : jastark (at) microsoft.com
Jamie Stark
OCS Senior Product Manager