Will Exchange 2010 have a better version of unified communications?

Back in November of 2007 Michael and I went to a Microsoft event in Lincolnshire, IL. It was at a movie theater of all places. The event was about Exchange 2007 service pack 1 and a preview of Windows Server 2008. What I remember most about this event was the presentation on Unified Communications. I also remember that it was freezing out and the drive took forever (thank you Illinois Department of Transportation).

The general idea of Unified Communication is that you can now use your phone to communicate with your email server. At first I was confused, but once I saw it in action, I was stunned. Rather than simply calling your secretary and having them reschedule your appointments or read your email, you call into the pbx which connects to the exchange server. You communicate via outlook voice access with voice prompts. You can change your meeting times (provided you have meetings), have your email read to you and even reply. The system will read to you using text to speech, which sounded pretty good. When you reply, it will be a wav file because speech to text isn't available. The person who you replied too will receive an attachment of your reply.

Michael wrote a research paper about Unified Communications. I helped setup the exchange server and the other components. We had to use trixbox because the cisco router is too expensive. It was really neat, when it worked properly. The sipx and trixbox servers were a lot more difficult. Configuring those servers caused me plenty of headaches. I learned you can't reliably run vmware workstation on a Windows 2003 domain controller.

Microsoft hasn't officially announced the next version of exchange yet. I'd be real interested to see what features have been improved and added. Exchange 2007 is a decent email server. When it works, it works well.

There was a lack of inexpensive voip solutions that would work with Exchange 2007. Michael and I couldn't afford to buy an expensive cisco router just to test it with Exchange 2007, nor could calumet tech services. Also, it was rather complicated to setup. Luckily, I was able to find some walk-through that worked somewhat well.

As simple google search turned up this about the next version of exchange (http://it-proknowledge.blogspot.com/2009/01/exchange-14-rumors-e14.html):

In the Unified Messaging (and unified communications) area there will be big improvements and new features. One specific feature that MS has mentioned is that location profile synchronization is no longer needed for OCS <-> Exchange integration.
Better Caller-ID resolution is also a "known" improvement. Huntgroup and Agent configuration and usage will also be improves.

One of the very cool features of Exchange 2007 is the ability to call and talk to your Exchange server, also called Outlook Voice Access. One of the major drawback with this feature is that it can only perform voice recognition with English. Also text to speech is limited to a few languages. In E14 Microsoft will expand the support to 26 languages for both voice recognition and text to speech.