Microsoft betas office phone system

OK, so now I'm confused, too. It was just earlier this month--I'm sure it was--that Microsoft exec Jeff Raikes stood up in front of a ballroom full of VoiceCon attendees and said that desk phones were dead and softphones would carry the day. Yet now, here's Microsoft going into beta with a small-business VoIP PBX called Response Point. It's apparently from a different part of Microsoft than OCS, which makes a certain amount of sense because the hardware and software parts of Microsoft don't talk much to each other. Response Point is SIP-based, sort of, in a way that other SIP-standard handsets won't work with it. And given that Raikes has performed the rite of extreme unction on desksets, one wonders if Response Point will wind up as the Coleco Adam of SMB PBXes.

For more information about Response Point:
- read this article from the soon-to-be-online-only Infoworld

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