So there is a new version of Microsoft Office Communicator client for everyone:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1ad57f8f-78f7-45f6-a8c0-805936f46645&DisplayLang=en

The KB article that explains what it fixes is broken so I don't know yet what is fixed but I'm sure it's some good stuff.

So things have been pretty crazy all week at Voice Ignite.  In Chicago right now getting learning everything there is to know about OCS 2007 and a little about R2.  So if you didn't see my previous posts about R2 the whole world should know that Microsoft is coming for your PBX system and unless you are Cisco you should be worried.

I'll post some more later this week about what I can tell you about R2 that isn't under NDA.

So VoiceCon is happening right now over in Europe and Microsoft announced OCS 2007 R2 to the public.  There are lots of really crazy and cool features.  Here is a nice article from ZDnet that covers the basics:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1641

Although they nicely hit all of the big features they don't nearly spend enough time on group chat and this will be the biggest and coolest feature for anyone in IT.  So here is the basics of it.  Group Chat is a chat room that keep the entire history of a thread in one place.  Invite someone new to the conversation - they can go back and read everything before jumping in.  What is really great is that you can drag anything into the group chat window - be it pictures, links, movies, etc.  So the uses of this are pretty endless.

In IT I see the big thing a common thread for long upgrades or testing processes.  Where you might be in the middle of a server 2003 to 2008 migration and you need a place to take quick notes about things you change, etc.  Well, easy solution.  Simply drag it in there and now you have documentation.  Completely searchable.  What we don't know yet is where can you archive or export to.

More as it comes.