Over the past few years, spurred on by what they view as a $45 billion opportunity by 2010, Microsoft has been incrementally ramping up the unified communications capabilities of its Office Communications Server (OCS) and Office Communicator products. With the release of OCS 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, Microsoft is attempting to bring the kind of unified communications (UC) and unified messaging functionality — not to mention comprehensive PBX and phone system compatibility/interoperability — that the telecom industry was reaching for way back in the early and mid-1990s, when Applied Voice Technology (AVT, now called Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, or AVST (News - Alert)) debuted perhaps the first unified messaging system, CallXPress Desktop for Windows, which remained the flagship computer telephony software for many years. Even back in 1993, CallXPress was a message-management, call-handling system with unified messaging capabilities encompassing voice, fax and email (in 1995, Version 3.0 could let you view your voicemail and listen to your email via text-to-speech).

At the same time (1993) over at Intel (News - Alert), Herman D’Hooge and his group were doing the first formulation of TAPI (Telephony Applications Programming Interface), which started out as a “PBX-on-a-card” with the secret codename of a famous steam-powered South African locomotive called the Mikado. Rumor has it that some Intel TAPI alumni still have their mint-condition burgundy rugby shirts emblazoned with a steam locomotive and “Mikado” on it.

Yes, TAPI began at Intel, where D'Hooge spec'd out a somewhat simplistic but workable API. Applications were based on this API and the service providers were written for the Mikado hardware, long before Microsoft gently suggested that Intel didn’t belong in the system APIs business. Later development was done jointly by Microsoft and Intel, and then just Microsoft. The first publicly available version, TAPI 1.3 (an add-on for Windows 3.1), was released in 1994. TAPI originally offered only first-party (desktop) call control, but attained third-party (server-directed) call control in Version 3.0. In retrospect, they should have perhaps adopted CAPI, an ISDN API, or CSTA (Computer Supported Telephony Application) published by ECMA (European Computer Manufacturer's Association) which was in any case reworked into TSAPI (Telephone Services Application Programming Interface) a third-party call control API published jointly by Novell and AT&T (News - Alert). The TSAPI SDK included a Lucent-developed PBX emulation to help testing without having to own a PBX. Needless to say, it emulated the AT&T G3 – in the mid-1990s some Europeans jokingly referred to TSAPI as a CSTA translator for AT&T equipment.

Back in 1995, Yours Truly wrote in the (now defunct) Computer Telephony magazine, “Simply put, Telephony Services for NetWare, version 2.0 by Novell integrates your NetWare Network Operating System (NOS) capabilities with those of a PBX. A Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) link is established between the PBX and a NetWare file server, through which a logical connection/association is made between a workstation phone and a PC. . . The PBX-NetWare server link gives an application the capabilities of the PBX, so long as it is written to the standard of the Novell/AT&T Telephony Services Applications Programming Interface. These capabilities include conference calling, speed dialing, ‘screen pop’ database retrieval based on Caller ID or other incoming call information, and ‘unified messaging’ which is based on a ‘universal mailbox’ holding voice mail, e-mail and faxes on NetWare LANs. The call control can be end-point first-party in nature (at the desktop) or third-party point (LAN/PBX).”

Also in 1995, AnswerSoft's AnswerSoft Phone LAN software appeared . It was a workgroup product with many features, including first and third-party call control, screen pops and unified messaging. A user could speed-dial to somebody out of a directory and conference in another party. AnswerSoft's Sixth Sense program let you set up rules that triggered other applications, access databases and do screen pops under designated circumstances. It could be configured to grab an incoming phone number via Caller ID, launch the ACT! contact manager, then do a screen pop detailing the caller.

Sound familiar?

In those days “unified messaging” was based on circuit-switched technology that was expensive and worked about 80 percent of the time. Today, with IP, cheap broadband, and a better sense of how to program for telecom, unified communications is about to achieve the “killer app” status touted on a yearly basis in every telecom magazine of the 1990s.

Microsoft’s great achievement with Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 is to take ideas and functions that have been kicking around for 15 years and make them ubiquitous (to the point of incorporating them into their existing collaborative suites), inexpensive and easy-to-use. Now VoIP, presence, instant messaging and conferencing will come together in the Office Communicator 2007 unified communications client, joined somewhere along the way by Office Live Meeting 2007 hosted conferencing and the RoundTable videoconferencing system.

As Ernie Wallerstein, the President of Zeacom (www.zeacom.com), recently told me, “The release of OCS brings increased market attention on UC solutions. Zeacom has been deploying UC solutions for over ten years. Until now, we have been deploying these solutions for advanced-thinking organizations. With Microsoft’s entry into the UC market and the buzz that will be created, we believe the vision of our existing customers and our product direction will be validated.”

Consultant and industry pundit Marc Robins, Founder and Chief Evangelism Office of the Robins Consulting Group (www.robinsconsult.com) “Several months ago I wrote about how we were going to see more of this type of VoIP integration with common PC-based desktop applications. We’ve seen this type of integration coming for a long time. The real power behind this announcement is the promise that this type of integration can be disseminated to every desktop, laptop and ultimately mobile devices. We’ve seen the PC, a computer platform, emerge as a communications center for most workers today. The hard, desktop phone has migrated and evolved into the softphone interface, and now the softphone interface is being completely integrated and ‘submerged’ in existing applications. It’s all being blended into one whole piece of communications fabric, for lack of a better analogy.”

“We’re moving along the continuum that started way back when in the CTI (News - Alert) days,” says Robins. “And now, with the computing horsepower that exists, the standardization of IP as the protocol of choice in terms of communications, we’ve now got the foundation for this to really propagate everywhere. It’s a wonderful thing. The value that Microsoft brings to the table is that they’re really the 800-pound gorilla, especially in the PC desktop computing space. So Microsoft is in a position to really make this happen in a very big way. One day all PBXs will interoperate with the Microsoft communications platform, and we’ll see what happens on the mobile side.”

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Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s (News - Alert) IP Communications Group. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.