Office Communication Server 2007 Launched by Microsoft
by Alex Woodie

Microsoft launched arguably its most important new product of the year yesterday when it declared the general availability of Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007, the Voice over IP (VoIP) server at the heart of the company's Unified Communications (UC) product strategy. By making phone calls and related functions--such as accessing voice mail or initiating a conference call--into an extension of Microsoft Office, the new UC product line should herald the same type of jump in worker productivity that e-mail and graphical interfaces brought during the 1990s, company officials said. READ MORE >

Will OCS 2007 Live Up to the Hype?
by Alex Woodie

During Microsoft's launch of its new Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 in San Francisco yesterday, there was plenty of talk about how OCS would herald a new era of worker productivity as it revolutionizes communication and collaboration. While the new software may end up being a giant success, customers have little more to go on than hype at the moment, and there are still many questions about how it will play in the real world. READ MORE >

Zend Puts Out New Release of Commercial-Grade PHP
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The third annual ZendCon conference for PHP programmers and vendors of PHP-related products was held in Cupertino, California, last week, and Zend Technology, the creator and maintainer of the open source PHP language and runtime tools, is using the event as a springboard for its new Zend Core 2.5 product, which includes development tools and runtime environments for specific platforms. Zend also announced the "Neon" beta release of Zend Studio for Eclipse as well as various integrations with products from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. READ MORE >

Growing Businesses, Upgrades Drive IT Hiring in Q4
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Fears of recession subsided last week thanks to a mediocre jobs report from the U.S. Labor Department that said employers added 110,000 jobs in September and 89,000 jobs in August, despite a slowdown in the construction and manufacturing sectors and jitters in the stock and mortgage markets. People were cheered last week--particularly on Wall Street--because jobs grew even though the economy seems to be slowing down a bit. So far, if surveys by Robert Half Technology are any indication, IT managers are still optimistic about the hiring they planned to do in the remaining three months of 2007. READ MORE >