For those of you who haven't seen a blog from me in over a year, you may be happy to hear the following information.

1. I am alive and well, with this post serving as evidence of the former.
2. We have a new name for our product - Microsoft Lync Server 2010.

Those who have followed our product for some time may have the following questions.

1. That's nice, but when will Microsoft Office Communications Server 2010 ship?
2. Oh, no.  Wait, wasn't it supposed to be Microsoft Communications Server 2010?
3. I have Live Communications Server 2005.  When will the next version of that be released?

So, in a bid to demistify the thoroughly confused, when the next version of Live Communications Server 2005 was released, it was named Office Communications Server 2007.  They were simply subsequent versions.  This is the case for Lync Server.  Microsoft Office Communications Server 2010 and Lync Server 2010 are one and the same thing - except the product is actually called Lync Server 2010.  If you happen to own any promotional merchandise that says "Office Communications Server 2010", I suggest you hang onto it because they will be collectors items someday.  They will fall in the same realm of rarity as newspapers that proclaim the wrong winner for an election or the baseball card of the player who failed to actually play a game.

So why did we make this name change? To be honest, I have some theories but in the interest of not having my most likely incorrect theories wildly expounded upon by overzealous journalists, I will neglect to mention them here.

However, I must admit that I am now proud to belong in the highest echelon of Microsoft products - the lucky few with a four letter name.  We are now in the same category as my favorite search engine Bing, my beloved XBox, and the extremely-cool-but-I-do-not-own-one Zune.  Even one of the coolest products to come out from Microsoft in some time - Kinect - can't boast of that.