Today Microsoft's Jeff Raikes unveiled the next stage of the company's Unified Communications strategy, showing the bells and whistles that will be added with Office Communicator 2007 (which comes as a desktop client, a browser-based client and a mobile phone/PDA client), Office Communications Server 2007* and Exchange Server 2007. Basically, with Office 2007, you can go seamlessly from email to IM to video conferencing to VoIP and mobile telephony, with only one client program and a single directory. Big companies are already doing most of this stuff, of course, but typically with three or more incompatible servicess, and several incompatible directory systems.

Microsoft claimed to be supporting open standards and announced several IP phone partners such as LG-Nortel, Thomson and Polycom. In response to a question from the floor, Microsoft said it was llicensing technologies to Symbian, Palm, RIM etc so users would not necessarily be limited to Windows Mobile phones. In the switching business, the main partner is Siemens. HP and Motorola were also featured.

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