Microsoft Launches Live Communications Server 2005

Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) releases to manufacturing (RTM) Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server 2005. Part of the Microsoft Office System, Live Communications Server 2005, available for the first time in both Standard and Enterprise Editions.

"The release to manufacturing of Live Communications Server 2005 marks an important milestone in delivering on our vision for extending the value of Microsoft Office System to encompass rich real-time collaboration capabilities, empowering people to work together more effectively," said Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of Real-Time Collaboration at Microsoft.

It enables organizations to extend the benefits of enterprise instant messaging and presence awareness to remote business partners, customers, co-workers and suppliers, empowering them to quickly find and communicate with each other and ultimately make better decisions more quickly.

An advanced, tiered architecture using Microsoft SQL Server (TM) benefits customers by substantially improving reliability, availability and scalability to mitigate the risk of unplanned downtime and deliver a higher level of availability.

Enterprise-grade active user capacity allows organizations to pool Live Communications Server 2005 Enterprise Edition servers to support up to hundreds of thousands of users as their enterprise grows.

Live Communications Server 2005 also is an enterprise real-time collaboration platform built on the industry-standard Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE).

Live Communications Server 2005 (www.microsoft.com/livecomm) has been released to manufacturers and will be available Dec. 1 through standard Microsoft distribution channels and Microsoft volume licensing.