Presence technology appears throughout the Microsoft Office system, from document workspaces inside Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 to team sites and My Sites on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Because every person who works on a file stays associated with it, presence technology can provide multiple channels for communication. If you're working on a shared budget in Office Excel 2007, you can launch an instant message session with one or all of the budget's owners with a few clicks. You can escalate the conversation to a phone call or audio- or videoconference at any point. Presence is also a part of the desktop experience itself. Incoming calls show up as desktop alerts, complete with the caller's name and presence information. With a click, you can route a call to voice mail, reply with an e-mail or instant message, or even answer the phone.

Microsoft unified communications technologies also bring changes to the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 experience. Voice mail and faxes will arrive in your inbox and you can work with them just like any other e-mail. You can color-categorize them, assign priority, attach them to to-do items, even forward them.

When you're away from the office, you can dial in to hear your e-mails and voice mails read to you by the speech services built into Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. You can even access your contacts and place calls through your voice-accessible Office Outlook inbox.

When businesses deploy Microsoft unified communications technologies, they don't just add a stand-alone solution. They transform the entire Microsoft Office system and Windows Vista experience.