Instant communications as well as online conferencing and
collaborations are increasingly used for business purposes and
in distance education. One of these server-based application
scenarios is instant office communication, being tied closely
into the existing infrastructure, e.g., to enable unified authen-
tication and seamless integration. One of these application
server packages is Microsoft’s Office Communications Server
(OCS), which enables integration into existing Microsoft-
based infrastructures.
The OCS environment allows instant messaging, file ex-
changes, voice or video calls and web-based conferences,
amongst other additional features, see, e.g., [1]. We note that
unlike solely web-based conferencing solutions, the OCS en-
vironment provides (i) dedicated client software to be installed
on participating computers and (ii) access to the system using
a browser interface, allowing for broad accessibility. To enable
web-based access, the server typically communicates with
additional infrastructure servers, such as proxies and gateways.
Here we provide a first evaluation of the bandwidth utiliza-
tion characteristics for the Microsoft Office Communications
Server (version 2007 R2), which was deployed at an academic
institution in the upper Midwest.
The increased attractiveness and broad availability of con-
ferencing and collaboration solutions in the recent past has also
attracted research interests. The main focus of current research
efforts lies on the design and implementation of such systems,
see, e.g., [2] for a recent example, whereas research venues