Microsoft's Looming VON Announcement: Not VOIP?

Ellen Murashkin has a nice column on Microsoft's Looming VON Announcement: Not VOIP? in the online version of eWeek. The VoIP show VON is coming soon and this might be the time for Microsoft to truly position Live Communications Server 2005 as a VoIP pbx.

I tell you that this was on the horizon and Microsoft is catching on a little quicker than I thought they would with VoIP. Our firm has recently looked into doing VoIP and we've been looking at different products from TeleVantage to Vonexxus to even the (gasp!) Linux based freeware Asterisk as mentioned in the article. A buddy of mine has a ISP in St. Louis that is using Asterisk effectively and he'll be rolling out VoIP using Asterisk exclusively.

But as a Microsoft shop if they do release LCS '05 as a VoIP pbx I'll be jumping both feet into it as a solution provider. Ellen says it right when you have a 5 person site with all in one and LCS on the server (did anyone say SBS?). This is what clients are clamoring for and to have a all in one solution will be a perfect solution or the option for say a 20 person site to have another Win2K3 Server with LCS on it as their VoIP.

I follow Jeff Pulver's blog (one of founders of Vonage, FWD and a foremost authority on VoIP) and he continually mentions how this year has been the year of VoIP and even today he references again the Google stats that he monitors. VoIP is becoming in the know for SMB's and if Microsoft doesn't announce this at VON then I'll certainly be a little disappointed. At least with Microsoft I would be assured usually of a straightforward way to handle a solution rather than the jumbled mess of stuff out there now and deciding which player will stay around and for how long?