Office Communications Online Deployment and Availability

 

Office Communications Online Deployment and Availability

We are now live with the service upgrade we announced two weeks ago. In addition to the new capabilities mentioned earlier, we want to inform you about some details around Office Communications Online availability.

Office Communications Online provides instant messaging and presence awareness for secure real-time communications. Presence awareness shows you at a glance if someone is available to receive an instant message.

Office Communications (OC) Online is part of the BPOS Suite. If you have previously purchased rights to the BPOS Suite, you can now enable OC Online for your organization’s users. To enable the service, service administrators will go to the OC Online tab in the Service Settings area of the Microsoft Online Administrator’s Console (MOAC). Please review the Release Notes for details on the service enablement process.

OC Online requires the separate purchase and installation of Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2.  As a Limited Time Offer, Office Communications Online customers receive one licensed copy of Office Communicator 2007 R2 at no cost with each trial or paid subscription license to Office Communications Online. The software may only be used with Office Communications Online, and all rights to use the software will terminate upon expiration of the underlying subscription license or release of the next major new version of Office Communications Online, whichever comes first.  A link to the promotional Office Communicator client is available to service administrators through the OC Online tab in MOAC. Alternatively, end users are able to access and install the client through the My Company Portal download center.

OC Online will not be available for a few days. After the appearance today of OC Online in MOAC, there will be a go-live transition period of up to a few days before all end users will be able to access the service.  We will post an entry here when the go-live transition for OC Online is complete. We recommend waiting for this message before enabling the service for your users; you can subscribe to this blog via RSS. If you choose to enable OC Online before this transition is complete, users may see a “Cannot sign in to Communicator….” message when trying to use Office Communicator to connect to the OC Online service. Once the service is live, users will not see this message.

Posted: Thursday, April 16, 2009 12:25 AM by arvindsuthar

Microsoft Online Services Team Blog : Office Communications Online Deployment and Availability