There’s a pretty cool “demo video”:1 of Microsoft’s new “Office Communicator”:2 IM product over on “Channel 9″:4. Office Communicator is an enterprise IM solution that allows interconnection with both AOL’s AIM product and Yahoo!’s Messenger product. Some of the highlights of the video are:

* AOL AIM and Yahoo! Messenger integration
* Enterprise directory lookup
** Search by IM name or email address
** Lists phone numbers from directory
* PBX phone control via Office Messenger (cool!)
* Call forwarding and transferring control from Office Messenger
* VoIP calling from Office Messenger
* Live meeting data-sharing integration
* Conference calling integration (MCI service in this case)
* Discussion of security and encryption

I think the integration with “PBXs”:3 is particularly cool. PBX systems seem to be designed to be as non-intuitive as possible — a big part of this is due to the limits of a phone’s interface (i.e., a simple keypad with no display or a very small display). Obviously, you can build a much richer interface on a PC. I imagine that it would take some effort by a company’s IT department to get all of this working, but the productivity benefits could make it worth while.

I know a lot of people at work use IM to check to see if someone is at their desk before placing a call. Now you can check and call with a simple click of the mouse.

[4(Microsoft Channel 9 site)]http://channel9.msdn.com/

[3(Wikipedia PBX entry)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBX

[2(Office Communicator home page)]http://www.microsoft.com/office/rtc/client.mspx

[1(Microsoft Channel 9 video demo)]http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=69437