The Register: From soup to nuts with Microsoft’s collaboration chief

The Register: From soup to nuts with Microsoft’s collaboration chief "Previously, Microsoft has offered more or less the same IM client to everyone, whether they’re senior businessmen or teenage girls. But in the next six-seven months, says Gupta, Microsoft is will launch a new IM client, focused on information workers.
“Our instant messaging clients have been fairly generic,” says Gupta. “We are coming out with a specialised information worker client which will make it very easy to integrate with telephony applications.”
Users will be able to click on an icon to switch from IM to voice.
“Like Yahoo! it will go direct to VoIP, and it can also do [voice calls through the] PSTN (public switched telephone network) if there is the appropriate ‘connector’ installed on the LAN where there's a corporate network scenario - the connector being a piece of software for call control that works with the APIs of the switch that's installed.”
“It is probable that at some point similar versions of this will also be available on the consumer side, but the RTC group is just focused on the Information Worker scenarios at the moment.”