Wednesday, Microsoft officially said that it has released Office Communicator 2005 to manufacturing, publishing a QA session to provide customers with greater detail about its development and future. Office Communicator integrates IM, voice, video, telephony and Web conferencing into a single interface and makes those capabilities accessible across Microsoft's Office applications.

Communicator is the default client for Office Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005. LCS 2005 is designed with one goal in mind: To streamline business communication and provide customers with real-time collaboration. The relationship between Communicator and LCS can be likened to the reciprocal nature of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange.

Because of its integration with Office, users can initiate voice, video or text communications within Outlook or SharePoint portal software.

"Users now can view rich presence information for colleagues, partners and customers; select the most efficient mode of communication, whether it's IM, a phone call, a Web conference or e-mail; and instantly share ideas and information," said Jeff Raikes, group vice president of the Information Worker Group at Microsoft.

Today's QA expanded on that vision, touching on things to come. "We think Communicator is going to revolutionize enterprise communications, but it won't happen overnight. We will continue to improve and bring additional intelligence to this product," said Singh Pall, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Live Communications Team.

"In areas such as call routing, for example, there is no reason why Communicator can't serve the function of an administrative assistant."

Recent changes made to LCS 2005 by way of a service pack add presence federation tools to extend collaboration outside of the firewall to other organizations. With Communicator, users have access to presence features that rout incoming messages based on a schedule, or offer additional availability data such as the next available meeting.

Microsoft has taken pains to extend its reach around competing IM providers. A public instant messaging connectivity (PIC) add-on to LCS 2005 bridges the MSN, AOL and Yahoo IM networks.

An Office Communicator 2005 trial may be downloaded from FileForum.