According to a post on the Unified Communications Group Team Blog we can expect a public beta of the Release Candidate in a few days.
From the blog:
“Thousands of people in our early Technology Adopter Program, or TAP, already rely on “14” to provide their phone, conferencing, messaging, and other communications, many of them since February. This number will increase dramatically when we make the release candidate (RC) software available in a few days.”
Well all i can say is that this is some cool stuff. And when it is as good as in the Microsoft 2019 vision video the world will be so small.
So what actually happens is that you call someone and then just speaks in your native language and… well its better if you watch the video instead…
Chris Capossela the Senior vice president of Information Worker Product Management Group talks to Computerworld about life and some OCS deployment numbers.
“We feel good about the number of deployments thus far. Most of them do focus on instant messaging and various types of conferencing, about 140,000 seats. For OCS’s voice features, it’s about 25,000 seats now. We have some customers who will move to a new building and forgo a PBX, but those are early adopters. But with Office Communications Server 2010, we’ll be able to say in many instances, "You don’t need the PBX."
A job post as a program Manager in Redmond hints that Communicator Mobile of wave 14 will come to a wide variety of platforms.
i just cut out from the post…
“And you will engage Network Equipment Providers to ensure that they are actively supporting the Wave 14 Mobile Network integration architecture, including but not limited to Mobile Presence, Conferencing, Voicemail, SMS and Voice.
You will also organize and run a mobile device ecosystem to ensure distribution of Communicator Mobile across a wide variety of platforms and contribute technically to the removal of significant adoption blockers as they arise. As part of this activity you will conduct direct engagements with device manufacturers and mobile application developers”
Se the full post for more details and to apply for the job.
HP has a “Microsoft product release chart” on its Large Enterprise Business page and it states that OCS 14 / 2010 will be released in Q4 of 2010 so in about a year from now, i would have hoped for Q2 since i predict that its going to have some kick ass features.
Source http://h30458.www3.hp.com/us/us/ent/808787.html
However Computerworld wrote: SharePoint 2010 and OCS 2010 are expected to ship in May or June of next year, although Microsoft has not released an official ship date. about one week ago
You can read more in their article about Exchange 2010 here