You may or may not know that OCS 2007 R2 is about to be superseded by CS 2010 – sometime in this half of the year. At TechEd the covers were unveiled and a number of the features and capabilities started to emerge along with the changes in licensing such as Voice and Conferencing.
In a nutshell, with CS 2010 Microsoft are offering separate licenses for the enterprise voice functionality and unified conferencing functionality. This allows customers to choose whether to license for voice, conferencing, or both. With Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2, a single license covers both conferencing and voice, and customers can only license voice and conferencing together. The difference is shown in the tables below. (The name of the new license is shown in quotes as it is not final.)
The brief also explains that the price of the CS 2010 Enterprise CAL will be lower than the price of the OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise CAL, and that customers who purchase the OCS R2 Enterprise CAL before the release of CS 2010 and maintain their Software Assurance (SA) will have access rights equivalent to the rights under the “Voice” CAL for the CS 2010 release at minimum.
The effect is that existing customers who meet the requirements will get the complete set of enterprise voice functionality Microsoft deliver in CS 2010 for no additional charge.
What about new customers?
A new customer who wants to add Communications Server-based instant messaging, presence, and conferencing to their existing IP PBX system, but who is not yet ready to use our voice capability, will pay less using the CS 2010 licensing than they would using the OCS 2007 R2 licensing. The reason is that, as noted above, the CS 2010 Enterprise CAL, which is specific to conferencing, costs less than the OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise CAL, which includes both conferencing and voice. The new customer will not pay for voice functionality until they’re ready to use it.
A new customer will pay more with CS 2010 than OCS 2007 R2 if they want to use the full set of voice and conferencing capabilities to replace or enhance their existing IP PBX systems, but they’ll also get more, including call admission control for voice and video, support for Enhanced 9-1-1, survivable branch telephony, and multiple options for data centre resiliency.