It’s hardly groundbreaking news that Microsoft is entering the VoIP market, the real news is that Microsoft is disclosing more and more details publicly (I’m member of the private beta for Office Communicator Server 2007, but all the information we get is covered under NDA).

Microsoft’s own bold vision is that 100 Million users in 3 years timeframe will have access to VoIP through Microsoft Office applications and that it will cost approx. half of what VoIP implementations do today.

More on that subject later in this posting, first there is some interesting information on Shell’s planned deployment of Office Communicator Server 2007 from an article in NetworkWorld called “VoiceCon: Shell bets big on Microsoft for global VoIP plans” following are some snippets from the article –

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell is planning a global VoIP rollout with tens of thousands of IP phones that will ultimately run off of a mostly Microsoft-based server platform.

According to the article Shell is already using Live Communications Server 2005 and around 1.000 IP Phones hosted by Nortel IP PBX and with OCS 2007 it is planning to do a phased migration to a full-scale OCS deployment. From the start the dialplan will be based on Active Directory and Shell will have a mixture of IP hardphones from Nortel that are hosted by Nortel CS1000’s and Office Communicator softphones hosted by OCS 2007. If this is successful the next phase will be to move hundredsof disparate PBX systems to Nortel and OCS and eventually have all phones managed by the OCS environment. In the end Nortel VoIP gateway equipment, based in three datacenters, will only be used for PSTN breakout.

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