NetIQ, an Attachmate business, Tuesday announced the availability of a VoIP lifecycle management module for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. The NetIQ AppManager for Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) is designed to better manage server performance, determine performance thresholds and demonstrate service delivery, and track application performance with session activity and failure metrics for aggregated reporting, according to the company's announcement.

When we checked in with Todd Tucker, director of Product Marketing at NetIQ, he said: “The OCS innovation is a natural extension of our history in Microsoft environments.” NetIQ already provides management tools for a wide variety of multiple vendors’ platforms, including those supporting Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory.

Given that NetIQ also manages many other unified communications platforms and applications with the NetIQ AppManager, “organizations are able to view the performance and availability of complete unified communications services, manage service-impacting events crossing disparate technologies and conduct rapid route cause analysis to limit service downtime and improve incident and problem management,” according to the company.

When we asked Tucker how his company faced the challenge of enterprises that gradually deploy OCS by department, location, or job function, he said the “one of the advantages is that as companies pilot the service, they need information to smartly grow OCS across their business, and we provide that.” He continued to say, “This also applies to our approach in general other technology [in general] like unified communications and VMware. As companies begin to roll out the technology, they need to understand the baseline performance vs. the change. With OCS, the adoption rate data [that shows how well users are accepting and using OCS] is also important.”

Our observation: Managing systems well has been at the top of the list for IT managers as they consider and adopt VoIP and IP telephony, and we suppose that the same concern applies for unified communications in general and for OCS in particular. Enterprises will now have another comprehensive management tool to address this concern.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.