It's been available for a good while
Trevor wrote:
"From time to time, I am still impressed by technology."
Well, maybe you wouldn't have had to wait so long to be impressed with technology - if you didn't keep your eyes firmly planted on the big boys - Microsoft, Cisco et all. Asterisk runs on Linux, and could do a whole bunch of this stuff and more for years.
"There's nothing in Office Communication Server that a telco or really good PBX hasn’t been able to do for about a decade now. The difference is that now you can run the server for this kind of thing in a VM on second-rate hardware. If you are running the client on a physical box and have a decent headset you are off to the races.
I don’t know about you, but actually do find that kind of cool. Not too long ago this would have been completely beyond the reach of any SME. PBXes were too expensive, and the software solutions were similarly priced. Today, OCS and it’s various competitors are priced right, with only the complication of the install and maintenance being a preventative factor. Five years from now, I am sure the administration of something like OCS will be so simple that every SME out there would be able to host one if they so chose."
Again. Asterisk is free. It runs on top of a free and open source operating system. There are people running it on 266MHz ARM processors. I run it on old pc's starting from 500MHz. It can do Interactive Voice Menu's, Music on Hold, Queuing, voice mail, voicemail over email. It can plug into mobile phones and use a mobile phone as an outside line. It can talk to SIP and IAX clients - software and hardware - and a whole bunch of other protocols. It can plug into a ham radio network. It can do conferencing. Actually, it can do lot's of things. Just look it up. And it could do this for years and years. I have it installed in small companies starting from 5 employees.
Yes, it does require skills to install and configure. But in terms of software and hardware costs - it doesn't get more affordable then that. It is free. People the world over use it in large call centres, small companies, as well as at home to do all sorts of work for them.
OK - so OCS can integrate with AD. But you can make Asterisk do that as well. Samba can talk to AD - and with a little script trickery, you could make Asterisk pull info from there. And that, by itself - is not exactly a revolutionary, killer feature.
Oh, and there are quite a few other software PBX's out there - I only happen to be most familiar with Asterisk.
So rolling your eyes over and being impressed with Microsoft latest gizmo seems somehow unwarranted to me.