Microsoft Corp. will begin shipping its real-time communications RTC Server 2003 software in the third quarter as the company moves to capture a share of the enterprise instant messaging (IM) and collaboration market.
"We will begin shipping the English-language version in the third quarter, with the German and Japanese versions to follow around two weeks later," said Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of the real-time collaboration group at Microsoft, Thursday at a real-time communications technology event co-hosted by Siemens AG in Munich. "We will announce pricing in June."
The software represents Microsoft"s push into presence-based applications, which show when users are online and available to communicate. RTC Server 2003 will replace Microsoft"s Exchange 2000 server technology, according to Andrew Sinclair, group program manager in Microsoft"s real-time collaboration group. It will run on top of Windows Server 2003, he said.